Freemarker macro for i18n of links

[meonkeys]

Hi there! I'm Adam. I work on Mifos. Mifos uses Spring MVC and Freemarker.

Anyone have a macro for helping translation of messages with links?

A set of messages like this:

welcome.begin=Hello, please
welcome.linktext=click here
welcome.end=to login.

is much more of a pain to translate than this:

welcome.text=Hello, please click here to login.

The former is called a "lego message" or a "patchwork message" by a translator. Stand-alone phrases are most amenable to translation. Since context is lost in a patchwork message, this may lead to a poor translation.

But, as you might have guessed, the first version is more convenient for a developer when they need to wrap, say, an html anchor element around the "click here" text, like so:

Hello, please <a href="http://example.com/login">click here</a> to login.

Here's a real patchwork message in Mifos (screenshot of same). We got an idea from Siebrand, one of the kind folks at Translatewiki.net to use MarkdownJ, and an example Freemarker macro using a custom link markup by Van (a Mifos developer).

Does anyone have another way they allow messages with links to be translated as phrases? Do you use MarkdownJ, some other off-the-shelf syntax, or something custom?

Thanks!
-Adam

[meonkeys]

I played around with this a bit and I think a user-defined directive is a clean way to avoid patchwork messages.

Example snippet of a Java properties-style resource bundle:

welcome.text=Hello, please [click here](%s) to login.

Example Freemarker code to use this message:

[#assign mlink="org.example.ftl.MarkdownLinker"?new()]
[@mlink dest="http://example.com/login"][@msg "welcome.text"/][/@mlink]

Here's code for a working example (including the MarkdownLinker class referenced above).

[leveiji7]

Hello,

I'm looking to use i18n with FreeMarker, I have a lot of files i18n_en, i18n_fr,i18n_it, ...

My question : how do I get in my .ftl file for desplaying the good text corresponding to the local?

thanks