Translations and i18n

Wednesday 08 March 2006 4:03:41 am

I've just successfully created my first multilingual site thanks to the excellent tutorial submitted by a user. Unfortunately I couldn't see that the tutorial explained the concept behind the i18n-operator and the documentation for it leaves one question. It shows this example:

{"This is a test"|i18n}

Outputs "This is a test" translated to the current language. 

Where does the translation come from? What if I want to translate "This is some message specific to my website" - where do I specify it's translations? Does the i18n operator always expect input to be in english? I tried the above example on a page that uses nor-NO for locale, but all I had displayed was "This is a test".

Can someone point me to some more explanation of this?

Friday 24 March 2006 4:26:23 am

The translation files are named translation.ts (the same filename for each language) and located in /share/translations/locale. For example the Dutch translation is in the file /share/translations/dut-NL/translation.ts
Those translations are primarily for the admin interface.
If you just want to translate some template texts for a specific siteaccess, it is better to put them in an extension. Create the following directory structure:

extensions
   your_site         // a name you choose
      translations
         locale1      // for example: dut-NL
            translation.ts
         locale2      // for example: ger-DE
            translation.ts

Then put the following lines in /settings/siteaccess/your_siteaccess/site.ini.append[.php]:

[RegionalSettings]
Locale=locale
TextTranslation=enabled
TranslationExtensions[]=your_site

'locale' is the locale you want to use for this site access, for example dut-NL or ger-DE
'your_site' is the name of the directory you chose above.

To create the translation.ts files, you can use the tool ezlupdate, which scans your templates for the i18n operator and creates entries for each message to be translated. You can also create the files manually, see the files in /share/translations for as an example of the general structure.