Internationalization support

General guidelines

  • All config mode packages must be fully translatable, with complete English and German texts.
  • All new expert mode packages be fully translatable. English texts are required, German texts recommended.
  • Existing expert mode packages should be made translatable as soon as possible.
  • The “message IDs” (which are the arguments to the translate function) should be the English texts.

i18n support in LuCI

Internationalization support can be found in the luci.i18n package. Strings are translated using the i18n.translate and i18n.translatef functions (translate for static strings, translatef for printf-like formatted string).

Example from the gluon-config-mode-geo-location package:

local i18n = require "luci.i18n"
o = s:option(cbi.Flag, "_location", i18n.translate("Show node on the map"))

Adding translation templates to Gluon packages

The i18n support is based on the standard gettext system. For each translatable package, a translation template with extension .pot can be created using the i18n-scan.pl script from the LuCI repository:

cd package/gluon-config-mode-geo-location
mkdir i18n
cd i18n
../../../packages/luci/build/i18n-scan.pl ../files > gluon-config-mode-geo-location.pot

The entries in the template can be reordered after the generation if desirable. Lots of standard translations like “Cancel” are already available in the LuCI base translation file (see packages/luci/po/templates/base.pot) and can be removed from the template.

In addition, some additions to the Makefile must be made. Instead of OpenWrt’s default package.mk, the Gluon version $(GLUONDIR)/include/package.mk must be used. The i18n files must be installed and PKG_CONFIG_DEPENDS must be added:

...
include $(GLUONDIR)/include/package.mk

PKG_CONFIG_DEPENDS += $(GLUON_I18N_CONFIG)
...
define Build/Compile
  $(call GluonBuildI18N,gluon-config-mode-geo-location,i18n)
endef

define Package/gluon-config-mode-geo-location/install
  ...
  $(call GluonInstallI18N,gluon-config-mode-geo-location,$(1))
endef
...

Adding translations

A new translation file for a template can be added using the msginit command:

cd package/gluon-config-mode-geo-location/i18n
msginit -l de

This will create the file de.po in which the translations can be added.

The translation file can be updated to a new template version using the msgmerge command:

msgmerge -U de.po gluon-config-mode-geo-location.pot

After the merge, the translation file should be checked for “fuzzy matched” entries where the original English texts have changed. All entries from the the translation file should be translated in the .po file (or removed from it, so the original English texts are displayed instead).

Adding support for new languages

A list of all languages supported by LuCI can be found in the include/package.mk file of the Gluon repository. Adding translations for these languages is straightforward using the msginit command.

For other languages, support must be added tu LuCI first, which constitutes completely translating the base.pot. Please contact the upstream LuCI maintainers if you’d like to do this.