Overview
One of the common questions we get after every major release is what are the language file changes.
For those of us (me included) who have to maintain multilingual websites, maintaining the language file is known to be a common nightmare. Bunch of strings are changed, some of them are removed, many new added, and in many case, they are completely mixed up.
Some developers take the practice to put all the new strings at the bottom of the language file.
At JomSocial, we do not adhere to such practice because it is wrong out of many reasons.
First, the language file will soon become mixed and messy, and second, what to do with strings that are changed?
Back in 2006 we were all maintaining our language files like that. Trust me when i say, i've been there, and i done that.
Never again!
Harness Transifex instead
There is a free translation service called Transifex. You probably already know about it. It's the place where you can download all the translation files for many Joomla components, including JomSociall. We have been using Transifex to maintain our translations for many years, and it's proven to be working great.
But, in my experience people who are not happy with translations available on Transifex (yes there are some bad translations) or for whatever reason need to maintain their own translation, they usually just close Transifex window and go away, never to come back already planning countless hours lost in maintaining their own, plain language ini file
Well, the countless hours for translating will definitely happen, because you need to start somewhere and translate the file, but we will now show you how to cut those countless hours down to minutes when upgrade comes and never again ask what are the language changes.
What do i need for this magic?
- Transifex account - its totally free
- Source file - this is the file that needs to be translated. In our example, we will use the frontend language file of JomSocial 3.2 component. It is called en-GB.com_community.ini and it is located in JOOMLA/languages/en-GB folder. Further through this tutorial we will refer to it as just source file
- Translated file - as the name says, this is the file that is already translated. Counterpart of source file would be xx-YY.com_community.ini where xx-YY stands for the language code of the country that is translation made for. Further through this tutorial we will refer it as translated file