Translations

Overview

DMPRoadmap uses the FastGettext gem for managing internationalization. Several of the gems however continue to use the standard Rails I18n system so their specific translations files continue to reside in the config/locales/ directory.

FastGetText stores translations in the config/locale directory. This directory contains the master app.pot file and various subdirectories containing available translations. Those subdirectories each contain their own app.po file.

The current list of translations offered are:

• de - Deutsch
• en-GB - English (Great Britain)
• en-US - English (United States)
• es - Español
• fr - Français

Coming soon:

• ja - 日本語
• pt-BR - Português (Brasil)

To add a new language or update an existing translation you can follow one of two routes. The first is via an online web portal system called Pootle and the other is to manually update the app.po file directly. Please refer to the following sections for instructions:

• Translations through the Pootle web portal
• Translations made directly to the app.po files

Several of the plugins/gem files used by the DMPRoadmap system still use the Rails i18n system for translations. These files must also be updated.

• Translating DMPRoadmap plugins

Standards

You should use the ISO 639-1 language codes when creating a new translation. If you need/want to create a country specific variation for one of the ISO 639 macro-languages you should use the ISO 3166 2 character alpha codes to designate the country/region. For example en is the ISO 639 code for English and en-US and en-GB are the ISO 3166 country code specific variations for the United States and Great Britain. If you are uncertain which code to use, please contact the DMPRoadmap project team.

Steps to activate/enable a new translation

The list of which translations are available to your users is controlled by the languages database table. To make a translation available to your users:

1. Run the following rake task to add the language: rake gettext:add_language[ja,日本語]. If you want the translation to be the default for your application, provide an additional argument at the end of the command: rake gettext:add_language[ja,日本語,1]. This will make the new language the default.

To remove a translation:

1. Run the following rake task: rake gettext:remove_language[ja]

Note: If the app.po files are new or have been updated you should restart your application to ensure that the new copy is being used by the application.