Formats / Flutter ARB

ARB files, with the metadata still attached

Application Resource Bundle is JSON with a convention: every key can have a sibling starting with @ that describes it.

.arb

The @ entries are the context, and they are worth keeping

An ARB file carries a description and a placeholder list alongside each string. That is the best context any of these formats offers a translator, and a tool that drops it on import hands the translator a bare sentence and a guess.

Linguiqo reads the description as the string's context and keeps the placeholder definitions so the round trip does not lose them.

Placeholders are checked, not just carried

A translation that drops a placeholder the source had is a crash at runtime in most frameworks. Linguiqo flags it as a quality error rather than a suggestion, and a string with one missing cannot be signed off.

Questions

What about ICU plurals inside an ARB string?

An ICU plural is split into one field per plural form, so a translator fills exactly the forms their language has, and it is assembled back into ICU on export.

Upload a Flutter ARB file and see

The demo reads a real file of yours and shows what came back. No account, nothing kept.

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