Translations in Laravel
Translations in Laravel allow you to display your application in different languages easily and quickly. This allows your application to have a much greater reach depending on the languages you have enabled. Each language will generally be located in the resources/lang folder. By default Laravel is configured in English and will bring the resources/lang/en folder. If you want your application to display text in both English and Spanish, you must create the ../es folder. Within each language folder, there can be different files depending on the context, for example, Laravel comes with the passwords.php file by default, which contains the following content.
<?php
return [
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Password Reset Language Lines
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| The following language lines are the default lines which match reasons
| that are given by the password broker for a password update attempt
| has failed, such as for an invalid token or invalid new password.
|
*/
'reset' => 'Your password has been reset!',
'sent' => 'We have e-mailed your password reset link!',
'token' => 'This password reset token is invalid.',
'user' => "We can't find a user with that e-mail address.",
'throttled' => 'Please wait before retrying.',
];
Each file must return an array of keys and values where each key will contain a translation identifier and each value the translation itself.
Create a translation
To create a translation we are going to assume that you have a laravel project previously created.If not, you can visit our post Laravel Installation to create a new project quickly. After this, you are going to create the resources/lang/es folder. Next, we are going to create the greetings.php file in both en/es translation folders. We present below the content that each file should have.
/en/greetings.php
<?php
return [
'hello' => 'Hello World',
];
/es/greetings.php
<?php
return [
'hello' => 'Hola Mundo',
];
Using a translation
We are going to modify the file that comes by default with the Laravel installation called welcome.blade.php in the resoureces/views folder. To use the text of the translation, simply replace the string Laravel with the value of the translation taken from the lang helper.
@lang('greetings.hello')Or,
{{ '\{\{' }} __('greetings.hello') {{ '\}\}' }}Translations with parameters
Often it is necessary to display text where a word or section is dynamic. For this, simply indicate in the translation definition an identifier in the following way:
return [
'hello' => 'Hello :name',
];
To indicate the value that said identifier takes, simply pass it as the second parameter when displaying the message.
echo __('greetings.hello', ['name' => 'Steave']);
You can also indicate if the parameter should be shown in all uppercase by placing the parameter as :NAME or if you only want to show the first letter in uppercase, you should indicate the parameter as :Name.
Pluralization
In cases where it is necessary to translate a word in both its singular and plural form, we could create two entries in our translations array. However, Laravel provides a much more elegant way of dealing with this problem through the trans_choice helper.
Suppose we want to show the string result and results depending on whether a search returned one or multiple results. The correct entry in our array would be as follows:
return [
'search' => 'result|results',
];
If we want to display the first singular value, we can use the helper as follows:
echo trans_choice('forms.search', 1);
If we want to display the plural value, we should pass the number 2 as the second parameter of the helper.
echo trans_choice('forms.search', 2);
Until next time!.