[benbayard]

I worked on a project at Patreon to do something similar many years ago. We used a babel plugin to do the translation with as few changes to the code base as possible.

This application does not handle many important considerations for translation. Such as pluralization. In many languages there are multiple more ways to pluralize words. Russian has many different ways to pluralize. More problems will occur when you have words within words.

There is no way to do this without working on changing your codebase. I think what would work better is if you can create ICU compliant JSON.

How are you supposed to have this work in Japanese when it's RTL instead of LTR? That will require UI and localization challenges.

I think using AI to do translation will be fine for startups, but I'm not sure how well this will work on real production apps. I think significant work will be required to actually get this working:

https://stelejs.com

[maxpr]

I think modern Japanese is LTR, but besides that - I believe the project you worked in the past solves an important problem.

Besides pluralization (and e.g. Arabic having 6 forms zero/one/two/few/many/other), turned out number internationalization and currency conversion are big next challenges the community wants to address next.

> create ICU compliant JSON.

I think this is an excellent idea. I have a feeling in the future we will need ICU v2.0, sort of, but unfortunately it's an extremely hard problem and the probability to fail is pretty high (looks like project fluent is not actively maintained anymore: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent)

[koito17]

> I think modern Japanese is LTR

Depends on the medium. EPUB 2.0 (and later revisions) specifically supports vertical RTL text for use-cases like Japanese novels. Additionally, many novel reading websites support toggling between vertical and horizontal text. Vertical text implicitly switches to RTL text direction.

Of course, this is not a general use case. But saying "modern Japanese is LTR" is not quite accurate. Computer / digital media is commonly LTR and horizontal, but a single step outside exposes one to vertical text, and RTL text in physical newspapers, literature, comics, a subset of textbooks, and handwritten signs that try to look "traditional" in style.

[rafram]

Yeah, vertical RTL is very common in Japanese books.

[benbayard]

All good points, thank you for the information.