ZC37 – Introducing Zend_Translate

As far as the tutorial goes, it's pretty good, but each time I see this kind of tutorials on the net, how come no one actually uses Zend_Translate in a commercial environment?

What I'm saying is, if you have more than one developer working on the project, and you have marketers, SEO optimizers, HTML integrators and such... all these people are gonna add translation terms everywhere. How are you supposed to gather all of these therms once the website is finished and you want to send the whole terms list to the translation team? It's a bit utopian to think everyone will add a key in the language file each time he adds a single word on a page (mostly because it's not their job).

The probleme here is that there's dozens of ways to include Zend_Translate in your website. Some components are using it silently (Zend_Form) some others require to call a translate() on a translate object, some are just using the view helper, etc. There's no way we can retrieve all these terms automatically... so what's the point of the whole system? If you have a website using more than a thousand terms, it's a total nonsense. Or am I missing something?

Yeah, it could work this way, but if it's the development team, the marketers, the SEO optimizers and the HTML integrators who are bringing the texts in there, there's no way you can send it to the translation department without gathering everything before. That's the opposite problem in fact. I wonder if the problem comes from our way of working with texts or if it's more of a framework issue.

We thought about the site audit solution, but basically it creates a few problems too. First,  manual audits are just not conceivable, we're a small company and checking the whole codebase looking for terms each time we release a project would waste way too much time.

Then there's automatic audits, but there will always be some cases where you can't find all the keys. There might be keys only needed in very particular occasions, when a very particular client logs on and do a very particular action. Even if we logged everything during the development, there's still a risk that the developer will never try a piece of  code (whatever the reason) and then the translation system will never log or warn the missing key.

The solution could be to declare each needed term even if they're not used in this particular context, for example, declaring the need of a particular key before an if statement where its used. We could then log the missing key but it would require to include translation terms that are not currently needed. On the other hand, that might generate more stable cache files. I'm not really sure where I'm headed.

Thanks for the advice Jon, I'll see what I can do with the workflow. Unfortunately, I'm just a part of this chain. All I can do is bare with it for the moment. If I can find a great solution, if might just purpose it to the whole team but you spotted the exact same weak spot I was thinking about (the project is weak on developers).