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Translation rules

rules configuration is quite versatile to enable the correct directory structure in many use cases. Each rule uses glob-like path patterns to collect a list of source files. You can specify multiple rules to combine different directory structures into your MotaWord translations.

Let's look at the default value for rules:

{
   "source-directory": "src/en",
   "translations-directory": "src/{locale}",
   "rules": {
      "**/*": "{path}/{basename}"
   }
}

This rule tells motaword CLI:

take all the files in my src/en directory as source files and put their translations in the same path structure inside the src/{locale} directory where {locale} is each of your translation languages.

If your source and translations directories are organized in a simple manner, this can be sufficient for you. However, rules can handle very complex use cases. Let's take a look at one that is a little more complex than the default one:

You should look at the section Available variables in rules before the complex example, it will make the example easier to digest.

{
  "source-directory": "src/main/resources/strings",
  "translations-directory": "src/main/resources/translations",
  "rules": {
    "frontend/json/*.json": "{locale}/{path}/{basename}",
    "frontend/**/*.yml": "{locale}/{path}/{filename}.yaml",
    "pot/*.pot": "{locale}/{path}/{basename}",
    "md/*.md": "markdown-translations/{locale}/{path}/{filename}.md"
  },
  "exclude-rules": [
    "pot/passwords*"
  ]
}

A rules configuration like this says a lot :)

To debug and understand what your rules say, you can always run motaword debug. It will tell you how your rules are interpreted.

Let's go through the complex rules above:

Given we are translating our files into French, which has the language code fr

  1. Take src/main/resources/strings as the base directory for my source files.
  2. Take src/main/resources/translations as the base directory for translated files. The last folder is different than the source path.
  3. Translate all of .json files in src/main/resources/strings/frontend/json/ directory, without going down subdirectories
    1. And put their (e.g. French) translations into src/main/resources/translations/fr/frontend/json/
  4. Translate all of .yml files under src/main/resources/strings/frontend/ directory, going recursively in all subdirectories
    1. And put their (e.g. French) translations under src/main/resources/translations/fr/, by using respective relative path of the source file.
  5. Translate all of .md files in src/main/resources/strings/md/ directory, without going down subdirectories
    1. And put their (e.g. French) translations into src/main/resources/translations/fr/md/
  6. And finally, while doing all of that, exclude all files in src/main/resources/strings/pot directory whose file name starts with passwords.

If you are still here, you are an expert motaword configurer :)