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How to Handle Localization

Translations

Zammad GUI Translations - i18n/*.po

Zammad translations are managed exclusively via translations.zammad.org.

You are welcome to contribute. Please get a free account there if you want to do so.

Any pull requests modifying translation files directly will be rejected.

Zammad Notification Templates - app/views/mailer/* and app/views/messaging/*

These back end template files are also managed via translations.zammad.org.

Translatable strings are extracted from the English templates. Any other languages are automatically generated from the available translated contents of translations.zammad.org.

Any pull requests modifying translated template files directly will be rejected.

Zammad Text Modules - i18n/text_modules/*.yml

Zammad text modules are automatically imported when the first admin user is created, according to this user's language. This is just meant to provide for a smooth start with some existing helpful text modules. They can be modified later on; no subsequent import from the example files will be performed.

Feel free to send pull requests to add more helpful examples to existing files or even files for new languages.

Developer Workflows

How to Write Translatable Strings Well

Writing strings that can be translated well and are a pleasure to read for the end user is not always easy.

Bad Examples

  • lock - this English word is ambiguous, it can be a noun (a lock), an infinitive (to lock) and an imperative (lock this!). That makes it impossible to translate it properly.
  • No email! - this error message is not understandable for an end user.

Good Practices

  • Talk to the end user. Imagine you are a non-technical end user of Zammad. Would you understand the error messages? Use natural, respectful language.
  • Write at least two words. Whenever possible, avoid creating single-word strings. This will reduce ambiguity drastically.
  • Include punctuation. Strings should include punctuation like final stops (This is a sentence.) or colons (My label:) as part of the translatable string. This punctuation might look different in some languages and should therefore not be hardcoded.
  • Use placeholders, don't concatenate strings. Bad: "Open" + ticket_number, good: "Open ticket %s" (and pass ticket_number as parameter). It's almost always a good idea to produce such slightly longer strings with placeholders. That helps translators to understand them and allows them to change the position of the placeholders in translations.

Weblate Process Overview

  • The codebase has a translation catalog file i18n/zammad.pot, which must be kept up-to-date.
  • Weblate automatically picks this file up from git and updates its database. Now translators see the new/changed strings and can work on them.
  • From time to time, Weblate pushes the new/updated translations via merge request to git.
  • After the merge, the translation files in i18n/zammad.*.po are updated.
  • Zammad will pick them up as soon as Translation.sync gets called, which happens for example during a package update.

Updating the Source String Catalog

If changes to translatable strings are made during the development process, developers can just run the following to re-extract the strings to the catalog file:

rails generate zammad:translation_catalog

This will update the i18n/zammad.pot file in Zammad. To do this for an existing addon module, call

rails generate zammad:translation_catalog --addon-path /path/to/addon

To perform additional tasks such as updating template files from translations, use:

rails generate zammad:translation_catalog --full

Testing Translation Changes from Weblate

To test any changes made to translations in Weblate that are not yet published to Zammad, you can use this workflow:

  • Download the current state of the language from Weblate as po file.
  • Save it locally in the Zammad folder as i18n/zammad.pt-br.po (for pt-br in this case, use corresponding file names for other languages).
  • Run rails r Translation.sync to import the latest state to the database.
  • Now the changes should appear in the GUI.

Known Issues With Localization

  • There is currently no support for plural forms.

API & Code Examples

CoffeeScript

See i18n.coffee

Translate With Markup Support

App.i18n.translateContent('translate and <b>html escape</b> and replace _markup_')

Translate Without Markup Support

App.i18n.translateInline('translate and <b>html escape</b> and no _markup_')

Translate Without Escaping

App.i18n.translatePlain('plain text')

Translate Datetime

App.Ticket.find(1).created_at
"2021-06-10T09:45:30.394Z"
App.i18n.translateTimestamp(App.Ticket.find(1).created_at)
"10.06.2021 11:45"

Translate Date

App.Ticket.find(1).created_at
"2021-06-10T09:45:30.394Z"
App.i18n.translateDate(App.Ticket.find(1).created_at)
"10.06.2021"

Ruby

Translate a String

Translation.translate('de-de', '3 high')
"3 hoch"

Enable Translation For an ObjectAttribute

> obj = ObjectManager::Attribute.find_by(name: 'my_attribute')
=> #<ObjectManager::Attribute:0x0000564593325508
...
[34] pry(main)> obj.data_option['translate'] = true
=> true
[35] pry(main)> obj.save
=> true