Problems with ng xi18n when adding new tags

Question

I'm using ´ng xi18n --output-path locale --out-file translations.en.xlf´ in the CLI to generate an xlf file, as per the the official Angular documentation - https://angular.io/guide/i18n. That all works well.

The docu then further suggests to manually copy and rename the file for each required localization - so e.g. ´translations.fr.xlf´ for french.

I've done that, ending up with 2 files: ´translations.en.xlf´ and ´translations.fr.xlf´

I've then continued working on the application, adding more i18n tags. Now I'm trying to update the xlf files to include the new tags, without overwriting the targets (i.e. french translations) I've already got in ´translations.fr.xlf´.

How can I do that?

So far I've tried:

1. ´ng xi18n --output-path locale --out-file translations.en.xlf´ - which only updates the english source xlf, not holding any targets
2. ´ng xi18n --output-path locale --out-file translations.fr.xlf´ - which overwrites all targets in my french localization file
3. Manually merging new tags from the en file into the fr file, which is cumbersome

I'm sure there's an easy way to achieve what I'm trying to do but the Angular docu doesn't go into detail for that specific problem.

Answer 1

I had great success updating these language files using xliffmerge as a post-processor.

ng xi18n --output-path src/i18n && xliffmerge --profile xliffmerge.json en fr

xliffmerge.json

{
  "xliffmergeOptions": {
    "srcDir": "src/i18n",
    "genDir": "src/i18n"    
  }
}

This updates all my language files which are kept in src/i18n. After running, I only need to reformat the files to be git-friendly and enter the new translations for the fr language file. These are easily identified using the git client of your choice.