Chapter 4Localization

The DocBook xslTNG stylesheets support localization in more than 70 languages. At the time of this writing: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Assamese, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (Taiwan), Chinese Simplified, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indian Bangla, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kirghiz, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Northern Sami, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian in Cyrillic script, Serbian in Latin script, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Xhosa.

4.1Background

Near the end of the previous millennium, I was working on the DSSSL stylesheets for DocBook. They were popular enough that users of languages other than English wanted to use them.

I invented a mechanism for doing simple localization so that the word “Chapter” in “Chapter 5” would, for example, be spelled “Chapitre” if the book was in French, and “Розділ” if it was in Ukrainian. What started as a simple word substitution system grew a few macro facilities and became a little more sophisticated*.

Over time, with the aid of dozens of volunteers around the world who contributed files for their languages, the DocBook stylesheets developed localization capabilities that were for the most part good enough.

Fast forward a few years and those language-specific localization files, and some of those mechanisms, were ported to the XSLT 1.0 stylesheets for DocBook.

Fast forward another decade and those XSLT 1.0 localization files and some of the mechanisms were ported to the XSLT 2.0 stylesheets for DocBook.

Fast forward the better part of another decade and those XSLT 2.0 localization files and some of the mechanisms were ported to the DocBook xslTNG stylesheets.

Well. Sort of. Initially, I tried to replace the complex system of templates with a model that took the text that had to be generated and decomposed it into logical parts. It worked fine for English and many other languages, but didn’t account for the complexity of many others, such as Chinese.**

Starting in version 2.0.0, the xslTNG stylesheets have reverted back to a templating system. The localization files have been transformed a little bit to make some of the customization easier (I hope). They can’t stray too far from the original designs because I must reuse the localization data I have. I don’t want to devise a system that requires another army of volunteers to provide new localization data.

4.1.1Consequences

One unfortunate consequence of this history is that there’s some cruft in the localization files. There are mappings and possibly templates that aren’t actually used. Or, at least, they’re not used in the standard DocBook stylesheet. They might be used in customization layers.

I made a few attempts to trim out cruft, but found all of the results unsatisfying. So, at least for the moment, I’ve left it in place. Like everything on earth, it’s mostly harmless.

4.2Overview

In this context, localization mostly refers to “generated text”, words and symbols that appear in a published DocBook document that aren’t present in the original XML. Consider Figure 4.1, “Sample book source”.

 1 |<book xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
   |      version="5.0" xml:lang="en">
   |<info>
   |  <title>Localization Example</title>
 5 |</info>
   |<part>
   |<title>Part the first</title>
   |<chapter xml:id="chap">
   |<title>Chapter the first</title>
10 |<para>This is a tiny sample chapter.
   |See also <xref linkend="app"/>.</para>
   |</chapter>
   |</part>
   |<appendix xml:id="app">
15 |<title>An appendix</title>
   |<para>This is a tiny sample appendix.
   |See also <xref linkend="chap"/>.</para>
   |</appendix>
   |</book>
Figure 4.1Sample book source

It might be published as shown in Figure 4.2, “Sample book (annotated)”. Here we can see examples of several different kinds of generated text.

Image of a stack of papers with the example book published on the uppermost page. The published book includes additional generated text highlighted.
Figure 4.2Sample book (annotated)

The title “Table of Contents” is entirely generated; it appears nowhere in the XML. The chapter title appears in the text, but it’s labeled “1.” in the list of titles, “Chapter 1.” in the chapter itself, and “Chapter 1” (without the title) in the cross reference.

Now consider a French version of the document in Figure 4.3, “Sample book source (French)”.

 1 |<book xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
   |      version="5.0" xml:lang="fr">
   |<info>
   |  <title>Exemple de Localisation</title>
 5 |</info>
   |<part>
   |<title>Première partie</title>
   |<chapter xml:id="chap">
   |<title>Chapitre un</title>
10 |<para>Ceci est un petit exemple de chapitre.
   |Voir aussi <xref linkend="app"/>.</para>
   |</chapter>
   |</part>
   |<appendix xml:id="app">
15 |<title>Annexe</title>
   |<para>Ceci est un petit exemple d’annexe.
   |Voir aussi <xref linkend="chap"/>.</para>
   |</appendix>
   |</book>
Figure 4.3Sample book source (French)

In this case, the published version will have different localization, as shown in Figure 4.4, “Sample book (French)”.

The published book again, this time with French generated text.
Figure 4.4Sample book (French)

The question is, how is this accomplished? The answer, I’m afraid, is not simple.

It begins with a localization file.

4.3Localization files

The localization files are in src/main/locale in the repository. The localization file is designed to be simple enough to edit by hand. The stylesheets use compiled versions created by processing the input locale with src/main/xslt/modules/xform-locale.xsl to produce the files in xslt/locale in the distribution.

A locale begins by defining the language it supports and providing an English language name for it. The language attribute identifies the language (in the same terms as xml:lang) to which this localization applies.

That’s followed by metadata about the file (authors, etc.), then mappings, groups, lists, and letters as shown in Figure 4.5, “Example locale file (excerpted)”. We’ll consider each section in detail below.

 1 |<locale xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook/l10n/source"
   |        xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
   |        language="en" english-language-name="English">
   |  <info>
 5 |    
   |  </info>
   |  <mappings>
   |    <gentext key="above">above</gentext>
   |    
10 |  </mappings>
   |  <group name="title">
   |    <template match="self::db:chapter">{chapter} %l%.%c</template>
   |    
   |  </group>
15 |  <list name="_default">
   |    <items>%c</items>
   |    <items>%c {and} %c</items>
   |    <items>%c<repeat>, %c</repeat>, {and} %c</items>
   |  </list>
20 |  <letters>
   |    
   |  </letters>
   |</locale>
Figure 4.5Example locale file (excerpted)

4.3.1Mappings

The mappings section is a simple list of key/value pairs. Each gentext element defines a key and its replacement.

1 |  <mappings>
  |    <gentext key="above">above</gentext>
  |    <gentext key="abstract">Abstract</gentext>
  |    
5 |    <gentext key="xrefto">xref to</gentext>
  |   </mappings>

These mappings serve two purposes. For many languages, a lot of the work of defining a new localization is just updating these mappings. For a stylesheet customization layer, it provides a mechanism for remapping on an ad hoc basis.

In a localization template, any key entered in curly braces will be replaced by the mapping. In other words, for the example above, {abstract} will be replaced by the word “Abstract”. This mapping is done when the document is transformed, not when the localization file is compiled.

4.3.2Group

Groups are the primary templating system. In a context where generated text is required, a group is selected and within that group, a template is selected. The template is selected by evaluating the expression in the match attribute with the current node as the context item. A template with the match express true() will always succeed; it is used as a fallback.

The title-numbered group determines how titles are formatted if they are numbered, (there’s also title-unnumbered when titles aren’t being numbered):

1 |<group name="title-numbered">
  |   <template match="self::db:section[ancestor::db:preface]">%c</template>
  |   
  |   <template match="self::db:appendix">{Appendix} %l%.%c</template>
5 |   
  |   <template match="self::db:warning">%c</template>
  |   <template match="true()">%l%.%c</template>
  |</group>

(Note that not all titles are numbered, this is just the group that’s used if they could be. See $division-numbers, $component-numbers, and $section-numbers.)

Within a template, two kinds of substitution are performed: names in curly braces are replaced by the corresponding mapping and %-letter values are substituted as follows:

Table 4.1Template %-letter substitutions
%-letterSubstitution
%cThe content (for example, the text of the title)
%lThe label (for example, “Chapter 1” or “see also”)
%pThe page number (not yet implemented)
%oThe olink title (not yet implemented)
%.The separator (often, “. ”)
%%A literal % character

If the title group is being used to generate text for the chapter from our example document:

  • The chapter context is used to select the template ({chapter} %l%.%c).

  • The string {chapter} is replaced by the mapping for chapter, which is “Chapter” in English.

  • The label %l is “1” because this is the first chapter. (In fact, constructing the label uses templates from the localization file as well.)

  • The separator %. is “. ”. (Like the label, this is also constructed from a separate query to the localization file.)

  • And the content %c is “Chapter the first”. (There’s no markup in this title, but if there was, it would be retained. The content is a list of items, not a string.)

  • Literal text, such as the non-breakable space between “{chapter}” and “%l”, is retained verbatim.

4.3.3List

List elements are used to format items that can be repeated (terms in a variable list, lists of authors, lists of “see also” terms, etc.). The list consists of a series of items. Within each item, one or more content replacements is specified with %c. The items must be arranged so that there’s a match for one, two, three, etc. items.

If an item contains a repeat, that repeat will be used for as many items as necessary to complete the list formatting. The default list format is:

1 |   <list name="_default">
  |      <items>%c</items>
  |      <items>%c {and} %c</items>
  |      <items>%c<repeat>, %c</repeat>, {and} %c</items>
5 |   </list>

Consider how a list of four authors in an authorgroup would be formatted. Call them A, B, C, D, for simplicity (and assume there’s no list for “authorgroup”, so the “_default” will be used).

The first two items match one and two items, respectively. They aren’t appropriate for a list of four items. The third item contains three items and a repeat, so that can be used for a list of four (or more) items.

The first %c is “A”. The second %c is in a repeat, followed by another %c. There are three elements left in the list at this point, so two will be used in the repeat and the last one will follow it.

The result will be A, B, C, and D where the word “and” was found by looking for the and key in the mappings.

4.3.4Letters

The letters group is used to identify the lexical order and grouping of letters.

 1 |   <letters>
   |      <l i="-1"/>
   |      <l i="0">Symbols</l>
   |      <l i="10">A</l>
 5 |      <l i="10">a</l>
   |      
   |      <l i="20">B</l>
   |      <l i="20">b</l>
   |      
10 |   </letters>

All of the symbols with the same “i” value will be grouped together.

This mechanism dates from the days before XSLT supported language-specific collations. It is used in generated indexes, but perhaps it should simply be phased out.

4.4Customizing a localization

For many users, the localizations provided are entirely sufficient. But if you want to change them, you have a few options.

4.4.1Replacing entire localization files

If you want to replace an entire localization file (if, for example, you want to apply the same changes to a set of stylesheets), you can approach that as follows:

  1. Copy the localization source files.

  2. Update the ones you wish to change.

  3. Compile them all with src/main/xslt/modules/xform-locale.xsl saving the output in a new location.

  4. In your stylesheet, change the $v:localization-base-uri to point to the directory where the new locales reside. Those locale files will be used.

4.4.2Overriding mappings, groups, etc.

If you only want to override a small number of localization features, it may be simpler to do so directly in your stylesheet. The variable $v:custom-localizations will be merged with the default localizations before transformation begins. But you can only override existing groups with the procedure described here. You cannot use $v:custom-localizations to define new groups.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted:

  • The table of contents title to simply be “Contents”,

  • To omit the word “Appendix” from the appendix title, and

  • To change the form of the cross reference to appendixes to read “App. A” instead of “Appendix A”.

The following customization would accomplish that:

 1 |<xsl:variable name="v:custom-localizations">
   |  <locale xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook/l10n/source"
   |          language="en"
   |          english-language-name="English">
 5 |    <mappings>
   |      <gentext key="TableofContents">Contents</gentext>
   |    </mappings>
   |    <group name="title-numbered">
   |      <template name="appendix">%l%.%c</template>
10 |    </group>
   |    <group name="xref-number">
   |      <template name="appendix">App. %l</template>
   |    </group>
   |  </locale>
15 |</xsl:variable>

Note that it defines (a portion of) a locale source file for the language en. These changes only apply to that locale.

This fragment replaces the mapping for TableofContents and the templates for numbered titles and numbered cross references.

To update multiple languages, put additional locale elements in the variable as siblings.

Formatting our example document above now produces:

The published book again, this time with different generated text.
Figure 4.6Sample book (Alternate)

4.4.3Changing the group

Sometimes, rather than change a template, you want to change which group of templates is used. This is controlled by two variables: $v:user-title-groups and $v:user-xref-groups.

4.4.3.1Changing the title group

The $v:user-title-groups element consists of a list of title elements, each with an xpath attribute, a group attribute, and an optional template attribute.

Suppose the stylesheet is trying to generate a title for an element. It considers each title element in turn. The xpath expression is evaluated with the element as the context item. If the effective boolean value of the expression is true(), then that title is selected and templates from the corresponding group are used.

If a template attribute is present, a template with that name is used. Otherwise the local name of the element is used as the template name.

By default, sections in a preface are not numbered. That’s because the default title groups include:

  |<title xpath="self::db:section[ancestor::db:preface]"
  |       group="title-unnumbered"/>

If you add a title that matches sections in a preface to $v:user-title-groups, it will take precedence. For example:

  |<title xpath="self::db:section"
  |       group="title-numbered"/>

Because all of the user groups are consulted first, it isn’t necessary to include the predicate that limits this title to sections in a preface (although it wouldn’t change the result if you did).

4.4.3.2Changing the cross reference group

Cross references are processed just like titles, except that the $v:user-xref-groups element consists of a list of crossref elements. (See also Section 2.10, “Customize individual cross references”, for a discussion of how individual cross references can be customized.)

The default for cross references to chapters and appendixes is “xref-number-and-title”, so you get things like “Chapter 1. The Chapter Title”. In order to get a different presentation in the localization example used in this chapter, the following localization is used:

  |<xsl:variable name="v:user-xref-groups" as="element()*">
  |  <crossref xpath="self::db:chapter|self::db:appendix"
  |            context="xref-number"/>
  |</xsl:variable>

That’s why the cross reference to the first chapter is just “Chapter 1”.

4.5Caveats

There’s currently little documentation to tell you which group or template to change. The names are supposed to be somewhat self explanatory (for speakers of English), but sometimes you just have to look in the stylesheet.

The formalgroup element is unique in DocBook in that its label depends on what it contains. A formalgroup of figure elements is itself a “Figure” where a formalgroup of example elements is an “Example”. If you need to change it, you may have to create your own template for the formalgroup element in the m:headline mode. The default version is in modules/titles.xsl.


I’m not sure you’d pick a twenty-something, monolingual Anglophone American to do this work if you were planning ahead, but that’s what happened.

Turns out a fifty-something, monolingual Anglophone American isn’t much of an improvement, really.