Internationalization

Given that:

• Internationalization is important for accessibility and hence for SP
• It is usually faster to develop apps without multi-language support
• Adding multi-language at a later time often requires rewriting a lot of code and hunting for stray strings

then it would be great if SP had an easy way to allow adding multi-language support on apps that were not designed for it.

Prior tech

https://projectfluent.org/

String replacement

A partial solution to this requirement could be to have a way to replace hard-coded Text according to language baked in directly in the compiler.

For example, we could have a way to tag a Text as "to be internationalized", then the system could expose a function to load a new translation and automatically replace all flagged Text (and output a list of missing tags and unused tags).

The flag could also contain metadata about contextual information that could be useful for translations.

--> Problem: how do we make clear that a flagged Text is actually used as a tag and therefore should not be modified? --> Or: what happens when a flagged text is changed and we lose reference to all its translations?

--> Also, this goes against SP's "no mutable state" guarantee and breaks referential transparency.

A possible approach

(Which does not solve the referential transparency problem)

• flag a string as NOT needing translation

  ----> How? Single quotes for non-translated strings? Then what do we use for constructors?

• for any module for any definition for any string provide translation ----> What about duplicate strings in the same definition? Just translate them the same?

• A translation is for a whole string interpolation, so that interpolated variables can be used in different order