Best practice to render Laravel site in other language

Description

I have a Laravel site is in English. I want to make it compatible with Dutch also.

---

I start my homepage small, it only contain 3 sentences.

<h1 class="heading">My business WiFi</h1>
<p>Management via this page both your <a>private WiFi</a> as your <a>guest wifi</a>.</p>
<p>Or follow the use of your WiFi via our <a>statistics</a>.</p>

which will render this

My business WiFi
Management via this page both your private WiFi as your guest wifi.
Or follow the use of your WiFi via our statistics.

---

Attempt

I’ve installed this Laravel package and did all the installation steps from that repo.

My routes, service provider, alias, middleware, resources/lang/ , and the laravellocalization.php are all in to place.

---

routes.php

Route::group(['prefix' => LaravelLocalization::setLocale(), 'middleware' => [ 'localeSessionRedirect', 'localizationRedirect','localize'] ], function(){

    Route::get('/homepage', 'homepageController@index');

}); 

---

update providers array

McamaraLaravelLocalizationLaravelLocalizationServiceProvider::class

update alias

'LaravelLocalization'   => McamaraLaravelLocalizationFacadesLaravelLocalization::class

---

update $routeMiddleware

'localize' => McamaraLaravelLocalizationMiddlewareLaravelLocalizationRoutes::class,
'localizationRedirect' => McamaraLaravelLocalizationMiddlewareLaravelLocalizationRedirectFilter::class,
'localeSessionRedirect' => McamaraLaravelLocalizationMiddlewareLocaleSessionRedirect::class

---

/config/laravellocalization.php

<?php

return [

    'supportedLocales' => [
        'en'          => ['name' => 'English','script' => 'Latn', 'native' => 'English'],
        'nl'          => ['name' => 'Dutch','script' => 'Latn', 'native' => 'Nederlands'],
    ],

    'useAcceptLanguageHeader' => true,
    'hideDefaultLocaleInURL' => false,
];

---

Result

When I visit

http://site/nl/homepage

OR

http://site/en/homepage
http://site/homepage

I saw my site load as it should in English, which is good.

It return 404 when I visit some other site that not declared.

China

Ex. http://site/zh/homepage

Which is good because it works as intended.

---

But my main goal is I want see my site in Dutch when I land on

http://site/nl/homepage

I should see this 3 sentences below in Dutch

My business WiFi
Management via this page both your private WiFi as your guest wifi.
Or follow the use of your WiFi via our statistics.

---

Questions

Is this something that I need to declare /resources/lang/nl/texts.php?

Or is this something that can be achievable via library / plug-in / framework?

Answer

You need to create appropriate files and fill them with translated string (or arrays). If any of the translated string is not found, Laravel will fallback to config('fallback_locale').

With

// resources/lang/nl/texts.php
<?php return [
   'heading' => 'Mijn zakelijke WiFi',
   'line1' => 'Beheer via deze pagina zowel uw <a>private WiFi</a> als uw <a>gast wifi</a>.',
   'line2' => 'Of volg het gebruik van uw WiFi via onze <a>statistieken</a>.'
];

and

// resources/lang/en/texts.php
<?php return [
   'heading' => 'My business WiFi',
   'line1' => 'Management via this page both your <a>private WiFi</a> as your <a>guest wifi</a>.',
   'line2' => 'Or follow the use of your WiFi via our <a>statistics</a>.'
];

you will be able to retrieve these strings (prepending filename) anywhere by translate functions like trans('texts.heading'), trans_choice('texts.heading', $count) or special Blade directive @lang('texts.heading')

Your view could look like this:

<h1 class="heading">@lang('texts.heading')</h1>
<p>{!! trans('texts.line1') !!}</p>
<p>{!! trans('texts.line2') !!}</p>

Since there is HTML markup in your translated strings, you will have to unescape them by using {!! ... !!}.

In order to ease the pain of translation, there is Laravel Translation Manager, great plugin by Barry vd. Heuvel. You can let your users modify these strings and catch untranslated string automatically.

In general, I will not recommend autotranslation services if you require quality translation. If you don’t, just consider javascript library for that.