Internationalization

How to make your UI multi lingual

First, create your base application. Good, now create the files for the languages you want to support.

Example: German and English

Create two files in priv/lang and name them

• strings.de.po
• strings.en.po

The content of the file strings.de.po is fairly simple and straight forward:

msgid "firstname"
msgstr "Vorname"

msgid "lastname"
msgstr "Nachname"

msgid "street"
msgstr "Strasse"

msgid "List of Employees"
msgstr "Liste aller Angestellten"

msgid "Create a new Employee"
msgstr "Neuen Angestellten anlegen"

Then create the second one, name it strings.en.po and add these values to it:

msgid "firstname"
msgstr "Firstname"

msgid "lastname"
msgstr "Lastname"

msgid "street"
msgstr "Address"

msgid "List of Employees"
msgstr "List of all Employees"

msgid "Create a new Employee"
msgstr "Create a new Employee"

Almost done. Now create a view file that references the texts in the translation files:

{% trans "firstname" %} {% trans "lastname" %}
{% trans "List of Employees"%}

{% trans "Create a new Employee" %}

<a href="/english">English</a>
<a href="/german">German</a>

Final step: Set the language in the view

-module(cbatest_main_controller, [Req, SessionID]).
-compile([export_all]).


index('GET', []) ->
    {ok, [], [{"Content-Language", boss_session:get_session_data(SessionID, locale)}]}.

english('GET', []) ->
    boss_session:set_session_data(SessionID, locale, "en"),
    {redirect, [{action, "index"}]}.

german('GET', []) ->
    boss_session:set_session_data(SessionID, locale, "de"),
    {redirect, [{action, "index"}]}.

Should you use cb_admin in your application, then you can make use of the "Lang Center" section of cb_admin. It offers automatic translations into many languages at once. It might not always be the 100% correct (Google-)translation but at least it get you started.