Spreadsheet translations for Laravel

Why?

Maintaining multi-language support in Laravel applications can be hard

• Laravel's translation files are in plain PHP/JSON files. This assumes that the person who's going to translate the application knows how to work with PHP/JSON files, which is not always the case
• Each locale's translations are located in different folders. For example, the en folder contains English translations, and the de folder contains German translations. This separation is good on the code level but makes it hard to maintain 2+ locale translations. It is easy to add one new key and translation for English but forget to do it in German since nothing forces this or makes it easy to spot.

Alternatively, you can store the application's translations in a spreadsheet file, something like:

| key | en | de | es | |-----------------------|------------|-----------|----------------| | dashboard.statistics | Statistics | Statistik | Estadísticas | | login.form.first_name | First name | Vorname | Nombre de pila | | login.welcome | Welcome | Wilkommen | Bienvenida |

This solves all the above-mentioned problems:

• The translations maintainer does not need to know how to work with PHP or JSON
• All translations are maintained in a single file and view
• Each translation is located under the locale column, which makes it very easy to spot missing translations

But now the problem is, that Laravel cannot directly work with this spreadsheet file to display translations.

Here comes the spreadsheet-translations package! It reads spreadsheet files that contain translations for multiple locales and generates plain JSON files out of it that Laravel can work with.

Installation

You can install the package via Composer:

composer require orkhanahmadov/spreadsheet-translations

Publish config file using:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Orkhanahmadov\SpreadsheetTranslations\SpreadsheetTranslationsServiceProvider"

The config file contains the following parameters:

• locales - an array of locale codes that the parser should look for in the spreadsheet. The default is ['en']
• filepath - path to a spreadsheet file. By default, points to the translations.xlsx file in the Laravel project's lang directory. This config parameter can also use a URL as a remote file location. When a valid URL is provided parser will try to download the file to a temporary local file and parse it.
• sheet - defines which sheet should be used in a spreadsheet file. The default is null. When null, the parser selects an active sheet in the spreadsheet to parse translations from. If you want to use a different sheet, provide the sheet's name on this parameter.
• header_row_number - which row should be used as header. The default is 1. The header row should contain locale codes that are defined as locales config parameter
• key_column - which column should be used for translation keys. The default is A column.
• ignored_rows - an array of row numbers that should be ignored when translations are parsed. The default is an empty array.

Usage

Let's imagine we have the following Excel spreadsheet file which is located in a remote server with a public URL https://example.com/translations.xlsx. Spreadsheet contains:

| comments | key | en | de | es | |------------------------------------|-----------------------|------------|-----------|----------------| | Dashboard statistics section title | dashboard.statistics | Statistics | Statistik | Estadísticas | | ignore this row !!!!! | | | | | | First name field on login form | login.form.first_name | First name | Vorname | Nombre de pila | | Welcome page title | login.welcome | Welcome | Wilkommen | Bienvenida |

We want to:

• Point parser to the remote file to download and parse
• Parse only en and de locale translations
• Use the key column as key, in this case, column B in the spreadsheet coordinates
• Ignore row number 3

Once we publish the config file we need to make the following adjustments:

[
    'filepath' => 'https://example.com/translations.xlsx', // direct download URL of the file
    'locales' => ['en', 'de'], // parse `en` and `de` translations only, which means `es` will be ignored
    'key_column' => 'B', // sets key column to B
    'ignored_rows' => [3], // ignore row number 3
]

Package ships with an artisan command translations:generate.

php artisan translations:generate

When executed it generates necessary JSON translation files in Laravel's lang directory.

For above spreadsheet file and configuration translations:generate will generate following folder and file structure:

• lang/
  • en.json
    • {"dashboard.statistics": "Stastitics", "login.form.first_name": "First name", "welcome": "Welcome"}
  • de.json
    • {"dashboard.statistics": "Statistik", "login.form.first_name": "Vorname", "welcome": "Wilkommen"}

Testing

composer test

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

Security

If you discover any security-related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Orkhan Ahmadov
• AirLST GmbH
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

Alternatives

You can check larswiegers/laravel-translations-checker if you want to detect missing translations.