Localization 23 December 2005

If the site that regularly provides the same kind of information is translated into several languages, it should use some mechanism to change certain elements automatically. For example, such as staff position in Portfolio:

It allows you to list people just once:

<group type="art-director">
	<item>cmart</item>
</group>
<group type="designer">
	<item>sabirov</item>
</group>
<group type="programmer">
	<item>smalex</item>
</group>

But have two lists of their positions that can be saved into a separate file named, for instance, group-names.xml:

<data>
	<lang name="ru">
		<profession>
			<item type="art-director">арт-директор</item>
			<item type="designer">дизайнер</item>
			<item type="programmer">программист</item>
		</profession>
	</lang>
	<lang name="en">
		<profession>
			<item type="art-director">art director</item>
			<item type="designer">designer</item>
			<item type="programmer">programmer</item>
		</profession>		
	</lang>
</data>

So, a multilanguage website can be based on a single XSLT template. Before realizing its main purpose, it will handle the file with names, single out what is needed and create the appropriate variable in the language specified through $lang:

<xsl:variable
	name="local-name"
	select="document ('group-names.xml')/data/lang[@name = $lang]"
/>

And you just need to select required items:

<xsl:template match="group">			
	<xsl:value-of
		select="$local-name/profession/item[@type = current()/@type]/text()"
	/>
</xsl:template>

In practice, you don’t have to copy this script. Say, you can include all definitions in the XSLT template or do the opposite and save strings for each language as a separate file.