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 know how to work with PHP/JSON file, which is not always the case
• Each locale translations are localed under different folders. For example, en folder for English translations, de folder for German. 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 there's nothing that forces this or makes it easy to spot.

Alternatively you can store 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 above-mentioned problems:

• 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 locale column, which makes is very easy to spot missing translations

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

Here comes spreadsheet-translations package! It reads spreadsheet file that contains 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"

Config file contains following parameters:

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

Usage

Let's imagine we have the following Excel spreadsheet file which is located in remote server with 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 key column as key, in this case column B in spreadsheet coordinates
• Ignore row number 3

Once we publish the config file we need to make follow 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
• 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.