Hello All,
The current implementation of the i18n transformer is able to output only a
single language in <i18n:text> tags. In the majority of cases this is what
is desired, however I need to be able to output multiple languages in a
single document. I'd like to extend the i18n text tag to be capable of
overriding its locale. Example: <i18n:text locale="en">Hello
World</i18n:text>.
This way, even if the default language parameter in the transformer was
'fr', I can represent certain elements in 'en'. This case especially applies
to Canada, where many printed forms must be in both English and French (and
this is basically what I need to do).
I spent my weekend tracing through the source code of the i18n transformer.
Two thoughts arise:
1) Indeed we can extend the source to support multiple languages.
Basically, we could include a Map of locales used, with a simple data
structure like:
class LocalePack { public Locale locale; public CatalogueInfo catalogue; }
This way we can load new language packs into the Map structure as we
encounter them in <i18n:text> nodes.
2) Why use Java at all? Would we take that much of a performance hit if
we used straight XSLT? We could just aggregate the language packs and use a
stylesheet to process the i18n text nodes and substitute them. A large
dictionary would be a performance hit, unless we had some way to keep the
XSLT stylesheet and parsed XML document resident in memory for whenever it's
needed.
Thoughts?
AJ
