Internationalization and Word Order

[Anthony Watson]

I want to have an internationalized String that takes the following format:

Returned results for "PLACEHOLDER" in:

where PLACEHOLDER is something dynamic that is returned from a data store and is already internationalized.

I was thinking that I could have two keys in a properties file:

1) returned=Returned results for
2) returned.part.two=in:

The problem is that I know that word order can vary in different languages (English, Spanish, etc) and that it would be difficult for a translator to get the word order correct for a String that is made up of multiple parts.

How are people doing this? Please help. Thanks.

[Paul Clapham]

From the API docs for java.text.MessageFormat:

"MessageFormat provides a means to produce concatenated messages in language-neutral way. Use this to construct messages displayed for end users."

Sounds exactly like your question. You could probably go a long way with that class.

[Jean-Francois Briere]

I was thinking that I could have two keys in a properties file:
1) returned=Returned results for
2) returned.part.two=in:
The problem is that I know that word order can vary in different languages...

The only way to avoid this kind of problem is to not separate in two tokens the sentence. Instead you should use a message with argument(s):

returned=Returned results for {0} in:

Then it would be easy to change the word order in another locale.
You should read the documentation of java.text.MessageFormat class.

Regards