Translations

Converse supports localization of its user interface and date formats. As of writing, 46 languages are supported.

The translations of Converse can be found in the src/i18n directory.

Translations of Converse are very welcome. You can add translations either manually by editing the .po files in the src/i18n/locales directory, or through the web at Weblate.

As of version 3.3.0, Converse no longer automatically bundles translations in its source file and instead fetches only the relevant locale for the current session from a URL as specified by the assets_path setting.

There are three configuration settings relevant to translations and localisation. You’re encouraged to read the documentation for each of them.

• i18n
• locales
• assets_path

Manually updating translations

If you simply want to add a few missing translations, then consider doing it through the web at Weblate.

Some things however cannot be done via Weblate and instead have to be done manually in a checkout of the Converse source repository.

These tasks are documented below.

Updating the global translations template (.pot file)

The gettext .pot file located in ./locale/converse.pot is the template containing all translations and from which for each language an individual PO file is generated.

The .pot file contains all translatable strings extracted from Converse.

To make a user-facing string translatable, wrap it in the double underscore helper function like so:

const { __ } = _converse.i18n.env;
const str = __('This string will be translated at runtime');

After adding the string, you’ll need to regenerate the POT file:

make pot

Making a translations file for a new language

To create a new translations file for a language in which Converse is not yet translated into, do the following:

Note

In this example we use Polish (pl), you need to substitute ‘pl’ with your own language’s code.

mkdir -p ./src/i18n/locales/pl/LC_MESSAGES
msginit -i ./src/i18n/converse.pot -o ./src/i18n/locales/pl/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po -l pl

Please make sure to add the following attributes at the top of the file (under Content-Transfer-Encoding). They are required as configuration settings for Jed, the JavaScript translations library that we’re using.

"domain: converse\n"
"lang: pl\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"plural_forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

Updating an existing translations file

You can update the .po file for a specific language by doing the following:

Note

In this example we use German (de), you need to substitute ‘de’ with your own language’s code.

msgmerge ./src/i18n/locales/de/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po ./src/i18n/converse.pot -U

To do this for ALL languages, run:

make po

The resulting .po file is then what gets translated.