Translations

Translations multiply the impact that Elgg can have by making it accessible to a larger percentage of the world.

The community will always be indebted to those of you who work hard to provide high quality translations for Elgg’s UI and docs.

Transifex

All translation for the Elgg project is organized through Transifex.

https://www.transifex.com/organization/elgg

Plugin authors are encouraged to coordinate translations via Transifex as well so the whole community can be unified and make it really easy for translators to contribute to any plugin in the Elgg ecosystem.

Pulling translations

The translations made in Transifex need to be periodically pulled into the Elgg code repository. This can be done with the script .scripts/languages.php bundled within Elgg’s source code.

Prerequisites for running the script are:
The script will do the following steps:

  1. Create a new git branch named {branch}_i18n_{timestamp}

  2. Pull translations for all languages that have 95% of the strings translated

  3. Remove possible invalid language codes

  4. Commit the changes to the branch

After this you must push the branch to Github and make a new Pull request.

For example if you want to pull the translations for the 3.x branch, run the following commands:

php .scripts/languages.php 3.x
git push -u your_fork 3.x_i18n_1515151617

Run the command without parameters to get more detailed information of the usage.

Transifex configuration

The configuration for Transifex can be found from Elgg’s source code in the file .tx/config.

This file defines:

  • The Transifex project associated with Elgg’s major version

  • The location of all the files that have translatable content

Read the Transifex documentation for further details.

New major Elgg version

Every major version of Elgg must have its own project in Transifex. This way we can make sure that strings added and removed between versions do not conflict with each other. For example a translation key removed in Elgg 3 should not get removed from translations made for Elgg 2. Respectfully a new string added only to Elgg 3 should not be included in the translations meant for Elgg 2.

The process of setting up a new major version is:

  1. Pull latest translations from Transifex to the previous major version

  2. Merge the git branch of the previous version to the new to make sure all the latest translation keys are present

  3. Create a new Transifex project to https://app.transifex.com/elgg/

  4. Update .tx/config file in the development branch of the new major version

    • Update the configuration to point to the new Transifex project

    • Remove configuration of removed plugins

    • Add configuration for new plugins

  5. Push the translation sources to the new Transifex project with the command:

    tx push -s

  6. Copy the new configuration file temporarily (do not commit) to the previous major version, and push the existing translations from it to the new project:

    tx push -t -f --no-interactive

Later, once the dedicated branch (e.g. 3.x has been created for the major version, configure Transifex to fetch new translation keys from it automatically in https://app.transifex.com/elgg/elgg-core-3/content/. This way you don’t have to repeat step 5 manually every time new translation keys are added.

It is important to always have a n.x branch besides the branches meant for specific minor versions (n.1, n.2, etc.). This way the URLs of the auto-update sources do not have to be updated every time a new minor branch is created.