This is applicable to almost any piece of software with text in it. When starting your new app, you should make sure you are using a separate language file for the strings in your app. This makes text reusable, and you can change it all in one place.

Once your app gains a community, if you did this, you can also get translators!

With Photon i made the massive mistake of hardcoding everything up until the app became massive, and my PR for un-hardcoding all the strings looks like this:

The amount of lines modified in the GitHub PR. 2,067 lines added, 1,082 removed.

It was worth it though! Because the community has translated it into 11 languages!

  • @ReveredOxygen
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    English
    11 month ago

    Not necessarily. You have to be able to tell between language strings vs strings that are supposed to be hardcoded

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      21 month ago

      Ok, that’s fair. I’d probably add a # FIXXME flag when I don’t want to mess around with that stuff for the moment to do that.