Localization

Basics

The Dignitas database is in Romanian. The interface, however, has full localization support. To achieve this, strings in PHP and in Smarty templates are written as English keywords and surrounded by calls to gettext(), such as

{t}label-remember-me{/t}

or, with argument support,

{t 1=$upvotePriv|nf}info-minimum-reputation-upvote-%1{/t}

We use poedit to build the catalog of English and Romanian translations. So far these are the only languages we support.

Installation

• Install the gettext package for your OS or distribution.
• Activate the gettext extension in PHP.
• Choose the preferred locale in Config.php. Note that the names must match exactly. For instance, if your system has a ro_RO locale, but the locale/ directory has a ro_RO.utf8 subdirectory, localization won't work.

Developer notes

We'd like to keep up with localization. You don't need to do the translation yourself, but we'd appreciate it if you tagged the strings that need be localized.

• In PHP, write any literal strings in English and surround them with a call to _() (a nice alias for gettext()). So instead of

return 'login failed'; // or
return 'autentificare eșuată';

please say

return _('info-login-failed');

• In Smarty templates, use the {t} block around string literals. We recommend doing this at paragraph level:

{t}some-descriptive-string-keywords{/t}

We use the smarty-gettext module. Please read its documentation, including the localization of plurals such as:

{t
  count=count($results)
  1=count($results)
  2=$query
  plural="number-results-plural-%1-%2"}
number-results-singular-%1-%2{/t}

Translator notes

This is optional, but we'll love you if you contribute your own translations! We use poedit for translating. It needs some light customization for the Smarty syntax (poedit doesn't know it by default).

• Install poedit.
• Run

poedit locale/<your_language>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po

• Go to Edit > Preferences and enter your name and email address.
• Under Edit > Preferences > Extractors, hit + to add a new parser. Set these values:
  • language = Smarty
  • extensions = *.tpl
  • parser command = php /path/to/dignitas/lib/smarty-plugins/tsmarty2c.php -o %o %F
  • an item in input files list = %f

To do the actual translation:

• Run Translation > Update from Source Code.
• Translate any new strings.

Please note that Apache (and possibly other HTTP servers) tend to cache the translated catalog. If you notice your newly added translations aren't being picked up, please restart Apache.

Before committing your changes, please diff messages.po and ensure you haven't deleted any existing translations. If something goes wrong, for example if the path to the Smarty extractor is incorrect, then poedit simply comments out messages it can no longer find in the source code.

Javascript localisation

In time, we collected enough Javascript strings that it was no longer scalable to translate them in the backend. We rolled our own rudimentary translation system for Javascript.

To use it, please copy en_US.js to your desired name and translate it. Please be sure to adapt the _plural() function to your language's needs. We can help with that part if you need us to.