Translation enhancements in APEX 18 and 19

The Oracle Application Express (APEX) documentation summarizes the translation process thus:

"To translate an application developed in App Builder, you must map the primary and target language, seed and export text to a translation file, translate the text, apply the translation file, and publish the translated application."

When you go to Shared Components and then click "Translate Application", this process is illustrated by a list:

So the "default" approach is to download the XLIFF file and use a third-party tool to do the translation by editing that file.

However, it is also possible to edit the translations directly from within APEX. Click on "Translation Repository" under Translation Utilities to access this editor.

A few simple, but very useful enhancements have been made to the Translation Repository pages in the last couple of APEX versions.

 In APEX 19, there is now a new column available called "Translated" which indicates whether the original string has been translated or not. Using this column it is easy to filter out the strings already translated.

The popup edit window for the translation has a checkbox, added in APEX 18, that allows you to update all existing occurrences of the source string with a new translation. This is useful if you have, for example, 100 buttons with the label "Save Changes" because you only need to do the translation once.

Also in APEX 18, a "Grid Edit" page was added so you could edit the translations using a tabular form. In APEX 19, this tabular form was replaced with an interactive grid.

This interactive grid also includes the "Translated" column that can be used to filter out the translations which are already done.

Note that sorting by the "Translate From" or "Translate To" columns in the interactive grid is not possible (if you try you'll get an "ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected - got NCLOB" error). But the list of available columns include "Translate From (Partial)" and "Translate To (Partial)" which extracts the first part of the string as a regular varchar2 (usually the strings to translate are not that long so you'll see the full string in the "Partial" column). If you need to sort the strings (I find it useful to sort alphabetically by the source string in order to find identical strings and use copy/paste to update the translation), use these "Partial" columns to set up the sorting.


Thanks to Joel Kallmann for taking the time to add these small but very useful enhancements into APEX based on my feedback.