Angular i18n Target Tagger

This is a simple Node script to add target tags to Angular i18n XLF translation files.

Please note that it is for XLF format. If you need/want to use another format, you may have to look for another solution.

Reason to write this script

When extracting text for translation for an Angular application, I could not find an option to generate the translation file with target tags. If you find a way to do it, then, you don't need this script. Otherwise, it may be helpful.

I don't know about other translation tools, but on OmegaT, you may not load your translation file without the target tags. To copy, paste and rename the source tags manually is so cumbersome!

How to use this script

With bash

There is a shell script named gtfl in the folder bin. If you want to put it somewhere (I suggest your home directory) and run it from anywhere, you may add it to your .bashrc file, like this (assuming you have it in your home directory):

export PATH="$HOME/angular_i18n_target_tagger/bin:$PATH"

Now you may open a terminal and run the command gtfl -h from anywhere and see a message of how to use the script.

NOTE: If you are on Windows 10, you may want to check the windows10 branch.

Directly with Node

You may run the script from the terminal with node, or you may import the functions addTargetTags and generateTranslationFile into a program of yours and use them from there.

If you decide to run it as is from the terminal, you will need to inform the source file and the language code. For example, if you are in this project folder using the example file provided in this project, and you want to generate translation file for Portuguese:

node ./src/gtf.js messages.xlf pt

This will generated a file named messages.pt.xlf.

Once you have your translation file with the target tags, you may use an application such as OmegaT to translate the text within the target tags.

Merging existing translations

In order to merge your existing translations, you must set custom ids for your translated strings, since automatically generated ids will be overwritten when you run ng xi18n on your project again.

This script will check if the location already has a file for the language you have informed. If so, then it will merge the existing translations within the target tags.

If you have modified the original text of any translation units (for instance, you decided to change "About" to "About me" or "About us"), the script will keep the existing translations and mark them with --needs-update, like this:

<source>About me</source>
<target>--needs-update-- Sobre</target>

In this case, the translator could delete --needs-update-- and update the translation to something like:

<target>Sobre mim</target>