Introducing Laravel-Lokalise: Streamline Your Laravel Translations with Lokalise

In the ever-expanding global market, providing localized content is paramount for engaging users from different regions. Using a translation provider like Lokalise ensures that your application can effortlessly manage translations, enabling you to deliver a personalized experience to your international audience. However, integrating Lokalise with Laravel has its challenges. That's why I developed laravel-lokalise, a package designed to seamlessly sync your Laravel translations with Lokalise, ensuring a smooth and efficient workflow.

Why Use Laravel-Lokalise?

Lokalise claims to support Laravel translations out of the box, but in reality, it falls short. It does not accommodate Laravel's placeholders or pluralization. Additionally, Laravel's approach to translation files—utilizing multiple PHP files per locale with nested keys and a JSON file per locale using the base locale as the key—poses a challenge for straightforward synchronization. The laravel-lokalise, package addresses these gaps, providing an elegant solution that requires no changes to your existing translations or Lokalise settings. It just works!

How Does It Work?

Our package is designed to offer the best out-of-the-box experience by performing several key functions:

1. Separate Checks for JSON and PHP Translations: The package differentiates between JSON and PHP translation files, ensuring accurate processing.
2. Prefixed Dotted Translation Keys: Dotted translation keys are prefixed by their respective file names to maintain consistency.
3. Format Conversion for Lokalise Compatibility: The package dynamically converts Laravel placeholders and pluralizations into formats compatible with Lokalise.
4. Seamless Uploads: Translations are uploaded to Lokalise effortlessly.
5. API-Based Downloads: Since Lokalise converts placeholders to a non-reversible format during downloads, the package leverages the translation keys API to fetch keys file-by-file and converts placeholders back to Laravel format before dumping them into their respective files.

Installation

Getting started with laravel-lokalise is straightforward. You can install the package via Composer:

composer require bambamboole/laravel-lokalise

Next, add the following environment variables to your .env file:

LOKALISE_API_TOKEN=your-lokalise-api-token
LOKALISE_PROJECT_ID=your-lokalise-project-id

Usage

Currently, the package is in its early stages of development, meaning it is quite opinionated and not very flexible. However, it covers the essential functions needed for efficient translation management.

To upload your translations to Lokalise, use the following command:

php artisan lokalise:upload

To download your translations from Lokalise, run:

php artisan lokalise:download

Conclusion

Managing translations in a Laravel application can be complex, especially when integrating with external services like Lokalise. The laravel-lokalise, package simplifies this process, ensuring your translations are synchronized accurately and efficiently. By bridging the gaps in Lokalise's support for Laravel, this package helps you maintain a seamless localization workflow. Try it out today and experience the ease of managing your Laravel translations with Lokalise.

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Feel free to reach out for any questions or support regarding the package. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback and continuously improving the integration to meet our localization needs. Happy translating!