szsoppa

Kanta - the ultimate solution to translations in Elixir & Phoenix web apps

Hey guys!

I’m happy to announce that our amazing team at Curiosum developed a very cool open-source library called Kanta. If you struggle with translations, it can help you a lot.

Kanta’s goal is to reduce the following pains:

Necessity to use external tools to translate .po files.
Having to describe the process of translating these files to non-tech people.
Having to send the .po files and receive translated versions from non-tech people.
Troubles with spotting not translated keys.
Having to deploy the new version of the app whenever a new translation is introduced.

All of that, packed within a friendly UI, and the best thing - to make it work, you don’t have to change anything in your code since it integrates with gettext. The installation is very simple, and for a start, we provide additional plugins:

DeepL, if you’d like to translate the keys automatically
PO Writer, if you’d like to export translations into .po files

Links:

Announcement blog post: Kanta Translation Solution for Elixir and Phoenix Apps | Curiosum
Kanta repository: GitHub - curiosum-dev/kanta: User-friendly translations manager for Elixir/Phoenix projects. · GitHub
DeepL plugin: GitHub - curiosum-dev/kanta_deep_l_plugin: DeepL integration for Kanta · GitHub
Po Writer plugin: GitHub - curiosum-dev/kanta_po_writer_plugin: PoWriter plugin for Kanta · GitHub

17 comments

/phoenix #library #gettext #opensource #internationalization

40 3011 17

2025-01-25 07:53:51 UTC

Most Liked

szsoppa

Hey, thanks for the question.

Think of Kanta as an additional layer on top of Gettext. The process is as following:

To understand the entire process, first I need to point out that you don’t have to change anything regarding gettext - just like you used to call gettext functions within your codebase, you still do. The first assumption of Kanta, when we started to develop it was the ability to integrate with current gettext calls within the app. The only thing to make this work is this line: GitHub - curiosum-dev/kanta: User-friendly translations manager for Elixir/Phoenix projects. · GitHub.
Kanta takes the translations you currently have in app and populates them into DB. That’s why you need to run these migrations: GitHub - curiosum-dev/kanta: User-friendly translations manager for Elixir/Phoenix projects. · GitHub.
New translation keys that appear in the timeline after point 2, will be added to DB as well.
Translations that you already have (both in DB, as well as .po files), can be overridden in Kanta UI at any point.
Kanta allows you to use a caching mechanism so that it doesn’t fetch the translations from DB every time it calls gettext. That’s solely for the performance reasons.

So, to summarize, Kanta at this stage of its development, is an extension to gettext. You still use gettext in your codebase, but now, you can also edit translations via UI without the need to release a new app version. It’s quite a popular scenario that applications are translated not by developers, but rather by non-tech people, and it’s especially useful for them (but not only).

Post #4

szsoppa

Looks good, didn’t know this lib before. There is, though, one significant difference here - we wanted a tied to gettext solution that would be very easy to add to existing projects, which we believe is the case for a majority of Elixir & Phoenix apps.

Our goal here is to provide a solution specifically for our beloved tech stack rather than creating a general-purpose tool

Post #8

szsoppa

Hey, thanks for your kind words!

About the frontend integration - we’ll need an API for that and a middleware that maps translations to a format acceptable by the library on the JS side. It’s doable and in our current roadmap

Post #13

Last Post!

RalfKin

I’ve used DeepL with gettext strings before, and I totally get what you’re asking. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically translate every string into all languages with a single click—at least not in the way you’re hoping. You would typically need to set up each language translation separately.

That said, I found that using a good software localization services helped speed things up, as they can integrate with your system and automate the process for multiple languages. It’s especially useful if you’re dealing with a lot of languages like you are.

I used a similar setup for a project where we had multiple languages to manage, and having that extra help really made a difference.

Post #18