Translation workflow

  1. Framework messages
  2. Documentation

Yii is translated in many languages in order to be useful for international applications and developers. Two main areas where contribution is very welcome are documentation and framework messages.

Framework messages

The framework has two types of messages: exceptions that are intended to developer and are never translated and messages that are actually visible to the end user such as validation errors.

In order to start with message translation:

  1. Check framework/messages/config.php and make sure your language is listed in languages. If not, add your language there (remember to keep the list in alphabetical order). The format of language code should follow IETF language tag spec, for example, ru, zh-CN.
  2. Go to framework and run ./yii message/extract @yii/messages/config.php --languages=<your_language>.
  3. Translate messages in framework/messages/your_language/yii.php. Make sure file is saved using UTF-8 encoding.
  4. Make a pull request.

In order to keep your translation up to date you may run ./yii message/extract @yii/messages/config.php --languages=<your_language> again. It will automatically re-extract messages keeping unchanged ones intact.

In the translation file each array element represents the translation (value) of a message (key). If the value is empty, the message is considered as not translated. Messages that no longer need translation will have their translations enclosed between a pair of '@@' marks. Message string can be used with plural forms format. Check i18n section of the guide for details.

Documentation

Put documentation translations under docs/<original>-<language> where <original> is the original documentation name such as guide or internals and <language> is the language code of the language docs are translated to. For the Russian guide translation it is docs/guide-ru.

After initial work is done you can get what's changed since last translation of the file using a special command from build directory:

php build translation "../docs/guide" "../docs/guide-ru" "Russian guide translation report" > report_guide_ru.html

If it will complain about composer, perform composer install in the source root dir.

For information on the documentation syntax and style guide, see documentation_style_guide.md.