Using JavaScript to Localize Text
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008Just about every web project I’ve been involved in have, at one time or the other, needed to present some text to the visitor through JavaScript. It could be in an alert box or some other way and the problem has always been to localize that text into different languages using resource files or satellite assemblies.
There are many ways of localizing the keys, but most of them involve writing out variables on a page with the localized text and then let the .js include files read from those variables. That’s not a good solution. It would be much better if the .js files could be rendered with the localized text directly.
At work, I’ve written exactly such a mechanism and here is a cleaned up, plug ‘n play version you can use in your own web project. It’s an HttpHandler that intercepts the requests to the .js files and performs the localization based on regular expressions. Here’s how it works.

