New in Symfony 5.4: Translation Improvements

Renamed the Translation Update Command

Contributed by Mathieu Santostefano in #43758

The well-known translation:update command extracts translatable contents from templates, controllers, and some PHP files. It's useful to automatically create (and update) the translation files of your applications.

Although the command "updates" the translation files, its main feature is to "extract" translatable contents. That's why in Symfony 5.4 we've updated its name from translation:update to translation:extract.

You can still use the old name, but you should update it as soon as possible because the old name will no longer work in Symfony 6.0.

GitHub Actions Integration

The lint:xliff command has added a new github output format so you can see the translation errors properly formatted in the GitHub Actions output. Use the following command to validate your translation files inside GitHub Actions:

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$ php bin/console lint:xliff translations/ --format=github

Translatable Help Messages

Contributed by Patrick Landolt in #41717

In Symfony 5.2 we introduced Translatable objects, which include not only the contents to translate but all the information needed to do so (translation parameters, translation domain, etc.)

In Symfony 5.4 we're improving Symfony Forms to allow these objects as the help message of form fields too:

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use Symfony\Component\Translation\TranslatableMessage;

$builder->add('zipCode', null, [
    'help' => new TranslatableMessage('admin.zip_code', ['%current_zip%' => $order->getZipCode()], 'admin'),
]);

Translatable Parameters in Translatable Objects

Contributed by kylekatarnls in #41858

Another improvement related to Translatable objects is that parameters can now also be translatable. This may sound confusing, but consider the following message:

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// message 'invoice.status'
(English) 'This invoice is in "%status%" status'
(Spanish) 'El estado de la factura es "%status%"'

In addition to translating the entire message, the %status% parameter must be translated as well. In Symfony 5.4 you can solve that by making the parameter a TranslatableMessage object:

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$message = new TranslatableMessage('invoice.status', ['%status%' => new TranslatableMessage('status.draft')]);
echo $message->trans($translator, 'en');
// This invoice is in "draft" status
echo $message->trans($translator, 'es');
// El estado de la factura es "borrador"