Babel-plugin-translate-strings

Babel plugin to translate static strings at compile time

TOC

• Installation
• What it does
• Plugin options

Installation

Intall the module using npm. The module isn't published yet but can be installed from the github repo:

$ npm install --save borilla/babel-plugin-translate-strings

Then, in babel configuration (usually in your .babelrc file), add the plugin to your list of plugins:

{
  "plugins": [
    [ "@borilla/babel-plugin-translate-strings", {
      "translateFunctionName": "_T",
      "module": "./src/translate",
      "moduleFunctionName": "translate"
    } ]
  ]
}

What it does

When applied to a source file, this will look through your source for code that looks like a call to translateFunctionName, apply the module function to its argument(s) and replace the code with the result, ie

var s = _T('string to translate');   --->   var s = 'the translated string';

Note: The translate function can only be applied if we can resolve the arguments' values at compile-time. Internally this uses babel's path.evaluate() function, which can only really resolve relatively simple cases. See /test files for examples of what can/cannot be currently resolved

Plugin options

Option	Description
translateFunctionName	Function name to look for in source code
module	Path to module containing our translate function (relative to the root of the application)
moduleFunctionName	Name of the translate function exported by the module. If this is not provided then it is assumed the module exports a single function, which is the translate function