For my Symfony project, that has to support two languages, I started with created a xliff file manually. This was really annoying. Not only the creation of the xml, but also the inability to see if you didn’t already translate this string. So, I wanted to use Poedit. But this wasn’t so easy.

I needed to create .po files, which are the uncompiled language files that contain all translations. Actually, a .pot file would even be better. I didn’t know how to extract the strings.

The LeaseWeb gettext bundle looked great, but I already had used normal translation strings in twig, like {% trans %} and {% endtrans %}. I didn’t want to refactor my whole project, just to be able to use gettext (with a third party bundle anyways). It might be a good option if you start your project from scratch though.

So then I found the Twig Gettext Extractor. This seemed rather complicated, as I never worked with Poedit before too. I am working on a Mac, and my code is on a virtual machine. This project seems to be about a tool that extracts the language strings from Twig. I decided to give it a try, and installed the project standalone.

When I tried to run through the project in Poedit, it came up with an error. I copy and pasted the commands in my terminal, and found out that it couldn’t render the Twig template, because I was using KnpPaginatorBundle. It didn’t understand a twig function that it was using.

Ok, fair enough, so I decided to add the bundle to my Symfony project. It didn’t help much: it was still throwing php errors, so it couldn’t extract anything.

Then I tried the JMSTranslationBundle for a second time. I had already tried this, but when I ran

as stated in the docs, it would output to xliff again. I don’t exactly remember why, but I installed the bundle again, and ran this extract again. This time, a .mo en .po file were present in my /Resource/translations bundle. To my great surprise, it now updated this .po file!

I was also surprised, because the website says the bundle doesn’t support .mo files.

Anyways, it turns out it is supported. At least on Symfony 2.3.6. The command you need to issue on an empty translations directory is this:

After that you can update your translations with this command:

Still, I think I am missing something in the workflow. When I add new strings to be translated to my project, the strings are added to the .po file, but they are not marked as “new” in Poedit. So it’s difficult to see what strings still need to be translated.

But, it’s much better than creating those language files by hand.