How to Leverage Angular to Build Multilingual Web Apps?

The internet has grown exponentially over the decades as a medium to offer information and services. Moreover, it is also considered to be a driving force in dissolving the barriers in creating a unified global community.

Businesses have been leveraging this medium to reach out to a vast global audience and they have also been endeavoring hard to ensure their flexibility and adaptability in the International platform.

Role of Angular in multilingual website

Multilingual websites are highly significant as they translate the website content into one or more foreign languages in order to better serve international audience in their local language.

Since its inception, Angular has been dominating the open source JavaScript frameworks’ landscape. Angular has a module called ng2-translate that not only offer components like services, directives, asynchronous loading of i18n but also filters and much more to translate your texts.

What is internationalization (i18n)?

Internationalization or i18n is a custom attribute of ng2 translate module that Angular tools and compilers recognize and after translation the compiler eliminates it.

The process of designing a software application in such a way that it is capable of adapting itself into various languages and regions without requiring any engineering changes is called internationalization (i18n).

Therefore, internationalization of any website via coding ensures that the same could be changed to different languages or regions along with their content.

How to internationalize your Angular web application?

Firstly initialize the ng-2 translation service in your application and then install the ng-2 translate plugin via npm.

After that you would need to add reference of TranslateModule in App Module which is by default used in TranslateStaticLoader. Otherwise you can use the custom loader for adding the reference.

Next you would need to add TranslateService inside your web App Component. Which language will you use in your web app while initializing it? Add that language and also set a default language if you want.

The languages of your target audience that you would like to use for translation of your website must be set within the *.json file by default.

You can either use the pipe for translations of web pages or use the translate directive. In case, you have dynamic value in translation then this directive facilitates you to pass the parameters into translation by using translateParams which is an input parameter.

Now suppose you would like to switch the language of your web app; what would you do? Well, it’s very easy! You would firstly need to set the language in TranslateService. Once you apply the new language the language of your web app will change automatically.

Your Turn

Now that you know the advantage internationalization can bring to your web application, are you going to consider an AngularJS web development company for your next web app project?

Get in touch with our experts to start a conversation!