Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

It still frustrates me that there's no built in gettext-style affordances for C#. I guess it doesn't fit the way people typically build software in .NET. IMO the result is that it's more work to localize your software, so a lot of software that should get localized doesn't.

I built a gettext-style system for my own software, so I feel like it's possible to do. But the gap between that and making something everyone can use is pretty big.

View on HN

You're "supposed to" use string resources. There's support for having a different resource pack per languages. It's not exactly frictionless, though.

(With the new "source generator" work it should be relatively straightforward to implement a gettext-style source scan if that's what you want.)

There's nothing wrong with the .NET resource system with culture-specific satellite assemblies etc as such. The bigger problem I see is lack of tooling and services for translation by non-developers, volunteers, professional translation bureaus etc. You can't expect them to fire up Visual Studio, clone your repo and start editing resx files. Especially as there's not even a translation view! With .po files, there's a ton of editors, online services, translators etc available.

At a previous job we utilized https://webtranslateit.com/ - it organized everything easily for volunteers to provide translations for all resx strings.

Nice, but perhaps a little pricy for small startups. That's actually one of the things I didn't emphasize perhaps. Not only is the gettext/.po eco system big, there's also a lot of free or relatively low cost services available.

> there's not even a translation view

With Windows Forms, at least back in the day, you could open a Form in the designer, change its language to something else and just edit text on the controls (or images, etc.). The changes would go into a resx file for the selected language. At first glance this looked quite cool, but on the other hand, translators now can ruin your UI, as there's not really a dedicated translation view that only allows to change resources ...

It's even more a mess when doing multi-platform. I've a Monogame Android prototype build of my game and somehow the .NET localization throws me exception at runtime. So it's easier to implement a service that load and handle localization than relying on supposed built-in mechanism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com