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Capturing JSON Content

Your Global Delivery Network project may have content delivered as JSON, such as content coming from AJAX requests.

This article is for JSON as a result of a JSON request. To identify JSON appearing within a Javascript string literal please reference our JavaScript article here.

Certain JSON key/value pairs may be required to remain in their source language to preserve the functionality of your site, and for this reason, Smartling does not automatically capture JSON content for translation. Instead, you need to identify where in your JSON the specific values to be translated are located.

JSON is made up of key/value pairs. Smartling translates only JSON values.

 

Identify Translatable Content

Indicating what JSON values you need to be translated is as simple as creating a new key/value pair using our custom "sl_translate" key. This key can have three values:

  • "sl_all" - All values are translated.
  • "sl_none" - No values are translated.
  • Comma-separated list of JSON keys to identify that their values should be translated.

The sl_translate needs to be the first key for it to be effective

The examples below consider the three types of supported key/value pairs.

 

Using "sl_all"

{
"sl_translate": "sl_all",
"status": 200,
"messages": "The request was successful",
"user": {
    "firstName": "John",
    "role": "Editor",
    "admin": false
},
"string1": "Here's some content for John to translate.",
"string2": "<div>Smartling automatically recognizes HTML in a JSON string.</div>",
"string3": "This is an additional string from your site."
}

All of these strings will be ingested:

  • "The request was successful"
  • "John"
  • "Editor"
  • "Here's some content for John to translate."
  • "<div>Smartling automatically recognizes HTML in a JSON string</div>"
  • "This is an additional string from your site."

 

Using "sl_none"

{
"sl_translate": "sl_none",
"status": 200,
"messages": "The request was successful",
"user": {
    "firstName": "John",
    "role": "Editor",
    "admin": false
},
"string1": "Here's some content for John to translate.",
"string2": "<div>Smartling automatically recognizes HTML in a JSON string.</div>",
"string3": "This is an additional string from your site."
}
 

None of the strings above will be ingested for translation. The "sl_none" value has a higher priority than "sl_all", and if both are used in a comma-separated list, "sl_none" will be prioritized and no strings will be ingested.

 

Using a Comma-separated List to Identify Keys

You have the ability to specify what keys you want to be translated by listing them as the value for the "sl_translate" key. For example:

{
"sl_translate": "messages, firstName, role",
"status": 200,
"messages": "The request was successful",
"user": {
    "firstName": "John",
    "role": "Editor",
    "admin": false
},
"string1": "Here's some content for John to translate.",
"string2": "<div>Smartling automatically recognizes HTML in a JSON string.</div>",
"string3": "This is an additional string from your site."
}
 

Only the values for the directly specified keys will be ingested. For example, to capture the string "John", we need to directly specify the "firstName" key it belongs to instead of its parent key of "user". For the above JSON, the following will be ingested:

  • "The request was successful"
  • "John"
  • "Editor"

Smartling automatically recognizes HTML content in JSON strings and parses it as HTML.

 

Identify Un-translatable Content

There may be cases when you would need to specify key/value pairs that do not require translation. For example, when working with a JSON file where it would be beneficial to use "sl_all" and indicate values that should be ignored instead of creating a large comma-separated list of values.

This can be done by using the "sl_notranslate" key that supports a comma-separated list of JSON keys to identify which values should not be translated:

{
"sl_translate": "sl_all",
"sl_notranslate": "messages, role",
"status": 200,
"messages": "The request was successful",
"user": {
    "firstName": "John",
    "role": "Editor",
    "admin": false
},
"string1": "Here's some content for John to translate.",
"string2": "<div>Smartling automatically recognizes HTML in a JSON string.</div>",
"string3": "This is an additional string from your site."
}

All of the strings in the above example will be ingested due to the "sl_all" key, with the exception of the specified "message" and "role" values that belong to "sl_notranslate":

  • "John:
  • "Here's some content for John to translate."
  • "<div>Smartling <strong>automatically</strong> recognises HTML markup in a JSON string</div>"
  • "This is an additional string from your site."

 

Create Variant Metadata for JSON Strings

If you want to create variant metadata in Smartling, you can do so by adding a "sl_variant" entry to your JSON object. This should contain a comma-separated list of JSON keys and variant values. For example:

{
    "sl_translate": "sl_all",
    "sl_variant": "string1:navmenu, string2:navmenu, string3:exitmessage",
    "string1": "Home",
    "string2": "Back",
    "string3": "Goodbye"
}

Using "sl_variant" above would create the following strings in Smartling:

String: Home
Variant: navmenu

String: Back
Variant: navmenu

String: Goodbye
Variant: exitmessage

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