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Translating Pelican

The Panel is translated by the community on Crowdin. Anyone can help, no coding needed. There is no minimum a language has to reach: whatever is translated ships, and missing strings fall back to English.

info

This covers translating the Panel itself. The documentation site is only available in English.

Getting started​

  1. Create a Crowdin account and join the pelican-dev project.
  2. Pick your language and start translating strings in the Crowdin editor.

Please do not open pull requests that change files in lang/ by hand. Translations are synced from Crowdin automatically and manual changes get overwritten. The English source strings live in lang/en/**/*.php in the panel repository. If you add new strings in a code contribution, add them to lang/en only.

Approval​

Only approved translations are shipped. Proofreaders review suggested translations for their language and approve them.

If your language has no proofreader, or you want to become one, ask in the Crowdin project discussions or on our Discord.

Placeholders and plurals​

Keep placeholders exactly as they are in the English string.

  • Placeholders start with a : and get replaced with a value. Don't translate or remove them, but you can move them around in the sentence.

    'greeting' => 'Hello :name!',

  • Plurals are separated by |. In English the first part is the singular and the second the plural. Use as many forms as your language needs, in the order your language's plural rules expect. Explicit ranges like {0} No files|[1,*] :count files work too.

    'model_label' => 'Backup Host|Backup Hosts',
    'create' => 'Created <b>:files</b>|Created <b>:count</b> new files',

  • Keep HTML tags like <b> as they are, only translate the text between them.

Requesting a new language​

Ask for the language to be added in the Crowdin project. Once it has approved strings it shows up in the Panel with the next sync.

Most languages need no code changes. Only languages with a regional code need a mapping in crowdin.yml (languages_mapping), for example zh-CN → zh_CN and pt-BR → pt_BR.

How translations reach the Panel​

Two GitHub workflows in the panel repository keep Crowdin and the code in sync:

  • Upload Crowdin Sources (upload-sources.yml) runs on every push to main that changes lang/en/** or crowdin.yml, and uploads the English strings to Crowdin.
  • Download Crowdin Translations (download-translations.yml) runs every Sunday at 00:00 UTC (and can be started manually). It downloads all approved translations, formats them with Pint and opens a "New Crowdin Translations" pull request from the i18n_crowdin_translations branch.

After that pull request is merged, the translations are part of the next release.

Languages in the Panel​

Every language folder in lang/ can be selected on the user's profile page, plus languages provided by plugins. Languages other than English show a note that they may not be fully translated, with an "Update On Crowdin" link back to the project. Any string that isn't translated yet is shown in English.