Introducing Internationalization for Rancher


Rancher has users all over the world, and for a long time we’ve wanted to internationalize our UI. Recently, this project became a reality and I embarked on the simple, yet massive, task of making our UI i18n-compliant. The task itself did not present a massive engineering challenge; short of hot loading translations scripts as to not bloat the UI javascript, the majority of the project was moving strings around. I won’t focus on that effort here - what I want to draw your attention to is how to develop and add new translations to the UI. We are using the fantastic ember-intl framework to bring i18n support to the Rancher UI. If you have any questions on how the translation yaml file is consumed, or on the APIs we are using, I would refer to their wiki first. Hopefully you won’t need to, as we’ve tried to make this as easy for our end user as possible.

Getting Started with Translation

Translation files can be found in the Rancher UI GitHub repo in the translations folder. You’ll also find a simple readme that highlights the main points of this blog post. To get started, either create a new translations file here or copy and rename the en-us.yaml file (I suggest the latter, this will ensure you have all the latest localizable keys). Note: Regardless of the method of creation, the file name must match a locale in this supported locale list. Next, start the ember server as you normally would. If you started with a fresh yaml translation file instead of copy/renaming the English file, you may see ember-intl print a large wall of text about missing translations. This is a feature ember-intl provides to showcase the missing keys in translations file from the default loaded language (Rancher defaults to en-us). This tool is especially useful to translation maintainers, as the only translations Rancher maintains at the time of this post are en-us and zh-Hans-CN. At this point, you’re ready to translate, and in most cases this is as simple as replacing the English value with your locale’s value throughout the translation file. Do not change the key names: those should remain in English. These keys are the same in every translation file and are simply the keys consumed by ember-intl to map translation values.

Variable Substitution and Pluralization

There are a couple items I would like to address that may not be as cut and dry as we’d like. First is variable substitution. Lets take the following key as an example:

 unrestricted: "{appName} is configured to allow access to any {github} user."

The strings appName and github that are wrapped in mustaches are variables. When dealing with values like this in the translation file, simply keep the mustaches and variable name, and add it to your translation value where the variable would be appropriate in your language. The second item to address is pluralization. We have cases where text may or may not be plural based on some incoming variable. The following example showcases this:

 restricted: |
{appName} is configured to allow access to environment members, {orgs, plural,
=0 {no organizations}
=1
other
} and {users, plural,
=0 {no users}
=1
other
}.

As you can see, we have the appName variable as before, but we also have this new multiline content. This is how ember-intl deals with pluralization. In the first pluralization, the variable orgs is our check for pluralization. So if orgs is 0, we print the string no organizations. If orgs is 1, we print the string # organization where # is replaced with the orgs variable value and so on. It’s really quite clever on ember-intl’s part, even if it is quite confusing to read at first. As you’re working, you may want to see missing translations or simply toggle between languages. In the lower right of the UI, you will find a new Language Dropdown. You can also take advantage of a new shortcut and use SHFT+L to toggle between a special None language and the last selected language. When using this special None language, all keyed strings will be replaced with a string highlighting the path to the value in the translation file or you will see a *%MISSING%* message. This provides a simple way for the developer to see the path of the key in the translation file or that the translation is missing respectively. Please note the API has not been internationalized, so strings that are received from the API (e.g., status messages or logs) will not be translated.

Contributing a New Translation

If you’d like to add a translation to Rancher’s UI, feel free to open a pull request after you’ve created your translation. Please take into account that we do not maintain third party translations, so as we change the UI and add/remove content, the English and Chinese translations will change and your translation will fall out of sync. This is where the missing translations tool mentioned above will come in handy. That’s the basics of adding a new translation file. Again, we’ve attempted to make this as simple to the end user and translation maintainers as possible. If you have any questions, as usual feel free to reach out to us over on the forums or on GitHub! Wes\_AuthorWes works on all things UI at Rancher Labs.

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