ASP.Net: Approaches to multilingual websites with Javascript and AJAX

Question

We've recently completed phase 1 of a ASP.Net website in English and French. We went with using resource files to store language specific strings, but because the site used ASP.Net AJAX and javascript heavily we rigged up a solution to pass the right files through the ASP.Net pipeline where we could catch "tokens" and replace them with the appropriate text pulled from the resource files.

This is the second project I've been involved in that had these kinds of challenges, the first one stored the text strings in a database, and instead of ASP.Net AJAX, it used the AJAX tools that come with the Prototype library and put all Javascript into aspx files so that the tokens could be replaced on the way out.

What I'm wondering is, has anyone else encountered a similar scenario? What approach did you take? What lessons were learned? How did you deal with things like internationalized date formats?

Answer 1

In my main project (a RAD framework using PHP with gettext for translations) we're doing already alot of prepare operations on javascript files like merging and minifying them. Within this preperations we parse for gettext-markers and replace them with the language specific text.

The result get save as javascript file and normal included into the html.

<script scr="var/scripts/en_GB-76909c49e9222ec2bb2f45e0a3c8baef80deb665.js"></script>

The filename contains Locale and a hash value for caching.

Date and money values get always converted from system format to Locale format on output and visa versa for input.

Answer 2

To deal with il8n in our applications we dynamically create a JavaScript file (based on the locale we are interested in), that contains keys and translations, e.g.

LOCALISATIONS = {
    'util.date.day.long': ['Sunday', 'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday'],
    'util.date.day.short': ['Sun', 'Mon', 'Tue', 'Wed', 'Thu', 'Fri', 'Sat'],
    ...
};

and other JavaScript code will use this object to get translated text.