Question

For a website with a large amount of fixed strings (labels, announcements and etc), I’m going to add internationalization to the project and I want to know your experiences about using keywords vs real phrases in the original codes? Which one is better to use?

Check this example – in django:

Real phrase:

<p>
    {% trans "Welcome to my website" %}
</p>

Keyword:

<p>
    {% trans "WELCOME_MESSAGE" %}
</p>

Of course using real phrases is easier, but I have some bad experiences. Consider a general word, {% trans "contacts" %} used as title of a page and somewhere else used in a phrase like {{selected_contacts_count}}{% trans "contacts" %}, translation of contacts as title of a page can be different with translation of contacts as a word in a phrase, so this is a conflict.

Answer 1

Keywords.

Somewhere , sometime, someplace, you’ll need to have a translation table. It might be flat file, it might be a db store, but it’ll probably look like this:

field | language | message

it’ll be much easier to build and maintain a keyword based system :

WELCOME_MESSAGE | EN | Welcome to our online h ome
WELCOME_MESSAGE | FR | bienvenue chez nous en ligne
WELCOME_MESSAGE | SW | kuwakaribisha nyumbani kwetu online

If you’re interpolating data into these translation, the one issue that you’ll likely encounter is having to deal with pluralizations:

There is one item.  
There are four items.

You have one new message.
You have four new messages.

So keep that in mind as you move forward.