title: Alternatives to language resources
body: <p>I have a website which I would like to make available in many languages. I can do that using resource files. This has two drawbacks: I need IDs which makes it kind of ugly in the code and I need to deploy resource files. </p>
  
  <p>I have a different vision (I admit: I've seen it in a PHP environment): I would like my users to translate pages/modules. They would get a list of all strings in the main language and could then translate that into their language. Without restarting the site, without compilation.  </p>
  
  <p>It would be great if a programmer wouldn't have to think too much about resources. The vision is that he just uses strings in the main language and highlights the strings as "to be translated". Some kind of framework would scan all source files and would create a string table. Benefit: You don't need string identifiers.
  Highlighting strings could be done by wrapping them in a function call like loc("mystring"). </p>
  
  <p>The translation needs to work for controllers, views, models and above all for Javascript files. </p>
  
  <p>The first part (enable online translation) could probably be tackled by writing a custom resource provider like in <a href="http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/wwdbresourceprovider/" rel="nofollow">http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/wwdbresourceprovider/</a> </p>
  
  <p>What about the part without identifiers? Any ideas how to scan .js-files and views for string to be localized? Is there any existing framework?</p>