Templates were a fixed subject and body, so anything that changed per
message -- who it is going to, today's date -- had to be typed over
afterwards.
Eight names are recognised: recipientName, recipientFirstName,
recipientEmail, myName, myEmail, subject, date and time. Dates and times
go through datetime.ts rather than toLocaleDateString, so a template
follows the date order and clock the app was already told to use.
Filling happens on insert rather than on send. What a placeholder came to
is then visible in the composer and can be edited, instead of the message
changing between writing it and sending it.
Two things are deliberately left alone. A placeholder that cannot be
answered yet -- a recipient's name on a draft nobody has addressed -- stays
in the body as written, because substituting an empty string produces
"Hi ,", which is wrong rather than visibly unfinished; leaving the name
says which word is still missing and can be typed over. And a name that is
not a placeholder is left as written too, since a body that quietly ate an
unrecognised token would be worse than one that shows it.
Values are escaped on the way into HTML: a display name comes from a
contact card or a typed address and is not trusted markup.
`i18n:coverage` reported 100% while a hundred-odd strings rendered
English in every language. It was not wrong about what it measured: it
reads JSX text, and none of these were JSX text. They were toast
arguments, `confirmDialog({ title, confirmLabel })` props, `title=` and
`aria-label=` attributes, and template literals — every one built from an
expression the codemod cannot read.
176 source strings and 15 plural sets now go through t() and plural(),
translated into all nine languages. Where English put a word in a slot,
the sentence is spelled out per branch instead: `Filter ${verb}` became
"Filter saved" and "Filter created", because which word agrees with what,
and where it sits, is not a property English gets to decide for everyone.
Counts that were `${n} message${n === 1 ? "" : "s"}` are plural() calls,
so Russian and Ukrainian get three forms and Japanese and Chinese get the
one they actually have.
Two of the catalogue's own conventions were worth learning the hard way.
Plural entries are keyed on the English *other* form, not `one` — `one`
is a form English happens to have and Japanese does not. And a constant
table holding English that is translated at the render site is fine: the
literal is a key, not a leak.
Which is what the new check encodes. `scripts/i18n-literals.mjs` accepts
a string that is wrapped where it is written or is a catalogue key
somewhere, and refuses one that is neither — a string no catalogue can
translate, however many languages ship. It found twenty more than my own
sweep had, including the stale-folder toast seen in production. It runs
as part of `npm run i18n:check`.
Also fixed: the catalogue is now awaited before the first paint. The
tree is rebuilt when a catalogue lands, so components recover on their
own, but a string computed in an effect does not — a toast fired in that
gap is emitted in English and stays English. The wait costs nothing
visible, since the session bootstrap already shows a spinner and English
resolves immediately.
And the Japanese agenda title loses a space Japanese does not use:
"{date} からの予定" was written with the English habit of spacing around
a placeholder.
The 143 the codemod refused turned out to be two different things, and only
one of them needed a person.
A third were phrases sitting next to an icon -- `<Plus /> New rule`. The
refusal rule was "has siblings", which is broader than the danger: what breaks
a translation is a sibling that renders *text*, splitting a sentence into
fragments no one can reorder. An element beside a phrase does not. Narrowing
the rule to text-producing siblings let the codemod take 73 more.
The rest were real sentences with values in the middle, rebuilt by hand as
named placeholders -- "Your active script “{name}” was written by hand",
"Waiting on the server — goes out {when}." Named rather than positional
because a translator moves the parts around; counted things go through
plural() so Russian and Ukrainian get their three forms rather than English's
two.
Sentences with an element inside them needed something new. `Open <code>mailto:
</code> links in ihasmail` has two obvious treatments and both are wrong:
splitting it into two t() calls hands over fragments that cannot be reordered,
and dropping the <code> keeps the sentence whole but loses the monospace that
said "this is a literal". tNode() keeps the sentence whole and makes the
element a named hole in it, so a translator sees one sentence and can put the
hole where their language wants it. The German test asserts exactly that: the
same call renders the code first when the catalogue says so.
The coverage number was also lying, and it is worth saying how. It counted
text inside <code> and inside translate="no" as untranslated work, and
placeholders like "123456" and "+1 555 0100" -- a one-time code and a phone
format. None of those will ever be translated, so the report sat at 21 with 6
real items left. A number with an unreachable floor is something to argue with
rather than act on, so the tool now applies the same rules the codemod does.
596 wrapped, nothing remaining. Verified in the browser across 15 views, which
is where the last bulk pass hid a bug the tests could not see: no entities, no
unfilled placeholders, no raw t( in rendered text, and the toggle switches that
looked like emptied labels are text-free by design.
Wrapping ~1,000 strings by hand is a thousand chances to mistype the copy
itself, and a parser does not get bored. scripts/i18n-extract.mjs does the
mechanical part -- JSX text and the attributes a person actually reads -- and
refuses the rest rather than guessing. 78% now: 515 wrapped, 143 left.
What it refuses matters as much as what it does. Text split around an
interpolation arrives as separate fragments, and wrapping each on its own
produces "Move " and " messages", which no translator can do anything with;
those are listed for a person to rebuild as sentences. So is anything
containing a double quote, which would end the literal.
Three things it had to be taught, each found by running it:
- <code>, <kbd> and <pre> are not prose. The first run wrapped `label:name`
inside <code> -- a search operator, where translating it breaks the thing it
documents. Subtrees marked translate="no" are skipped for the same reason.
- `t` is a natural name for a callback parameter and several files already use
it, so an import called `t` is shadowed inside those callbacks -- silently,
wherever the local happens to be callable. The name is checked per file now
and aliased to `translate` where it is taken.
- JSX decodes HTML entities and a JS string literal does not, so
`Language & region` moved into t("...") and rendered the entity on screen.
That last one is the one worth remembering. Typecheck passed, 443 tests
passed, and the page said "Language & region" in plain sight. It took
looking at a screenshot, and then a sweep of ten views to find the second
occurrence in a sentence I had written by hand earlier the same day. Nothing
in the toolchain was ever going to catch it: it is valid TypeScript rendering
valid text that happens to be wrong.
The codemod decodes entities now, and checks for a quote after decoding rather
than before.
jcoffey-dev