I am contemplating how difficult or otherwise it would be to implement multilingual applications in Perl. In particular, if there were string literal objects that were used for all messages, this would allow global language switching, in a similar manner to how locale does it for collating sequences and formatting of numerics.

Has anybody done or seen this? Anybody aware of commercial code that does this (I am aware of a commercial system that uses this technique, but not in Perl)?

I read with interest this article by maverick about translation on the CB.

Another thought is how to take an existing app and make it multilingual. I envisage an equivalent of taint mode, flagging all untranslated string literals. The application can thus generate warnings about untranslated text - or even babelfish it on the fly.

I think that this would be a boon for international website developers. The HTML content could be in static files with a different file for each language, but the dynamic stuff (shopping trolleys etc.), produced by code, needs to come up in the user's language.

Thoughts please. Is this doable?

In reply to Multilingual Perl applications by rinceWind

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.