We have a website with angular translate. It works perfectly. We have a variable that we want to fixate with a certain language key. Let's say the site's language has 'en' and 'zh' as options, I want a certain translation to return with 'zh' no matter the language choice.

By browsing the API reference, I found a method called Instant to do just that. However, it doesn't work when we try to call

$translate.instant('zh', 'TRANSLATION_ID')

It returns an error of

TypeError: Object function (a,b,e){var f=d?n[d]:n,i=e?w[e]:u;if(f&&f.hasOwnProperty(a))return i.interpolate(f[a],b);if(h&&!v&&g.get(h)(a,d),d&&c&&d!==c){var j=n[c][a];if(j){var k;return i.setLocale(c),k=i.interpolate(j,b),i.setLocale(d),k}}return l&&(a=[l,a...<omitted>...a} has no method 'instant'

I wonder how to use the isntant method correctly.

We have a website with angular translate. It works perfectly. We have a variable that we want to fixate with a certain language key. Let's say the site's language has 'en' and 'zh' as options, I want a certain translation to return with 'zh' no matter the language choice.

By browsing the API reference, I found a method called Instant to do just that. However, it doesn't work when we try to call

$translate.instant('zh', 'TRANSLATION_ID')

It returns an error of

TypeError: Object function (a,b,e){var f=d?n[d]:n,i=e?w[e]:u;if(f&&f.hasOwnProperty(a))return i.interpolate(f[a],b);if(h&&!v&&g.get(h)(a,d),d&&c&&d!==c){var j=n[c][a];if(j){var k;return i.setLocale(c),k=i.interpolate(j,b),i.setLocale(d),k}}return l&&(a=[l,a...<omitted>...a} has no method 'instant'

I wonder how to use the isntant method correctly.

• javascript
• angularjs

• 2 Can you point to the docs for the function also when debugging you should use non-minified source when available otherwise the errors dont' tell you much. – shaunhusain Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 7:07

2 Answers 2

It seems like you don't use the method correctly, or probably just misunderstood it.

$translate.instant('ID') expects the translation id as first parameter and interpolation params as second parameter. It then translate the id synchronously instead of asynchronously (which is what $translate() does).

What you want is explicitly translating a translation id in a certain locale no matter what language key is currently used. This is currently not supported yet.

Hope that makes things clear.

Why don't you just embed the word in 'zh'. Don't use $translate there since you obviously don't want to translate that word.

If there's another reason for this; I would suggest:

// store the current language
var currentLanguage = $translate.use();
// change the language
$translate.use("zh").then(function (translation) {
    // then translate here
    $log.debug($translate.instant('SOME_WORD'));
    // set the previous language back when you're fulfilled
    $translate.use(currentLanguage);
});

But since this is async, this may translate some other words to 'zh' in the meantime.

A third way to achieve this would be setting the same translation value for SOME_WORD in each language file.

And a forth way I could think of is translating SOME_WORD only in the 'en' file (no translation value in the 'zh' file) and using 'en' as the fallback language. Such as: $translate.fallbackLanguage('en')