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Extracting UI Strings

These instructions describe how to extract UI strings so that they can be translated. The original source of these instructions, stored on Assembla, is here: 1

Markup for internationalized strings in the code

In the code, whenever developers write strings that will have to be translated, they use a special function whose name consists of a double underscore. A script (CakePHP's "i18n extract" script) can later be run to scan the code and extract the strings that are passed to this function.

__() function

CakePHP has several functions in this vein, but this is the function we will use most of the time. Note the pair of underscores.

__(‘some text’) => echo ‘some text’;
__(‘some text’, true) => return ‘some text’;

The language used in the code will be English.

Running cake i18n

  • Open a console on a Linux machine or Linux virtual machine.
  • Type : /var/http/tatoeba/cake/console/cake i18n
  • Choose : E (Extract POT file from source)
  • When asked if you want to merge all translations into a single file, say yes
  • Type in the path to app: /home/tatoeba/tatoeba-www/app
  • Type in the path to locale: /home/tatoeba/tatoeba-www/app/locale
  • Choose a name for the file that will be generated (in this example, default.pot): default.pot
  • Choose: Q (quit)

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