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Creating A New Confluence Translation

Added by David Soul [Atlassian], last edited by David Soul [Atlassian] on Aug 16, 2006  (view change)
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Confluence 2.9 Documentation

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If you would like to translate Confluence into your local language, follow the instructions below on creating a language pack plugin from an example.

The Confluence community is sharing their in-progress and complete translations. You should check that a shared translation to your target language has not already been started here.

Preparation

Start by checking out the technical overview of a Language Pack Plugin. Once you are familiar with the structure and content of a plugin, you can move on to creating your own:

  1. Check that you have the latest version of Confluence here. If not, you are recommended to install the latest version for translation, though you can use any version newer than 2.2. Refer to the guide on Upgrading Confluence for instructions.

  2. If you do not already have Apache Ant installed, download the latest version and setup your environmental variables according to the manual

  3. If you are using Confluence 2.2.0 only, you will need to unzip the language plugin base files from languages.zip into a subdirectory of <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY> called languages

Modifying The Example Language Pack Settings

This example will work from an example plugin en_AU.zip.

  1. Unzip the example en_AU language pack en_AU.zip into a subdirectory of <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages called en_AU. Note that is the file is just a renamed copy of default English properties file

  2. We will now update the properties file in the example to the latest version. Open your Confluence install directory and copy the confluence\WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\core\ConfluenceActionSupport.properties file to the example plugin directory src\etc\com\atlassian\confluence\core.

  3. Remove the old ConfluenceActionSupport_en_AU.properties file, and rename ConfluenceActionSupport.properties to ConfluenceActionSupport_en_AU.properties.

  4. Locate the plugin descriptor file, ConfluenceActionSupport properies file and flag image 
    <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/en_AU/src/etc/atlassian-plugin.xml
<CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/en_AU/src/etc/com/atlassian/confluence/core/ConfluenceActionSupport_en_AU.properties
<CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/en_AU/src/etc/templates/languages/en_AU/en_AU.png
  5. Detemine your language plugin key <KEY> using your country and locale according to the Language Pack Plugins guide

  6. Atlassian has licensed a set of flags for use with translations. Delete en_AU.png and download the appropriate flag from Language Pack Flags, renaming it to the correct key

  7. Update atlassian-plugin.xml to contain the relevant <KEY> and other references, including image type. Refer to the first section from the above Language Pack Plugins for help on deciding what to modify

  8. Rename the directory structure and filenames that contain en-AU to your own <KEY>. The directory should now appear as 
    <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/<KEY>/src/etc/atlassian-plugin.xml
<CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/<KEY>/src/etc/com/atlassian/confluence/core/ConfluenceActionSupport<KEY>.properties
<CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages/<KEY>/src/etc/templates/languages/<KEY>/<KEY>.png

    You are now ready to build the plugin with the default English text to check that your setup is are correct. These next few steps deploy the default English version of the pack under your own language

  9. From the command line, go to <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/languages and execute 
    ant -Dlanguage=<KEY> build
  10. Copy <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/plugins/<KEY>/dist/languages-<KEY>.jar to <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib

  11. Restart Confluence

  12. From your browser, login as an Administrator, then go to Administration -> Language and verify that you are able to select the translation

Updating The Language Pack

To collaborate on the translation process, you may wish to upload your translation to the Community Translations page. Repeat these instructions to test each iteration of your translation attempt.

  1. Unzip excelbundle0.9.zip to your local drive.

  2. Browse to your Confluence install and go to the \confluence\WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\core directory. Copy the ConfluenceActionSupport.properties file there into the translation_tool directory and rename it to ConfluenceActionSupport_en.properties.

  3. If you want to start a fresh translation, skip this step. To work from an existing translation, copy it into the translation_tool directory and remove any country variant from the filename, eg ConfluenceActionSupport_ru_RU.properties becomes ConfluenceActionSupport_ru.properties.

  4. Call the translation tool to create the spreadsheet file. For example, to create a Russian translation, open a terminal window in the translation_tool directory and call 
    java -jar excelbundle.jar -export translation_ru.xls -l en,ru -r "%cd%"
  5. Edit the file content, referring to Translating ConfluenceActionSupport Content for more information on how to modify the string values.

  6. Call the translation tool to export the updates back into the localised properties file. For the example Russian translation, open a terminal window, go to the translation_tool directory and call 
    java -jar excelbundle.jar -import translation_ru.xls -l ru -r "%cd%"
  7. Once you have completed editing, you must copy and rename the localised translation back to the language plugin directory. For frequent updates, you may wish to create a script to do this.

  8. To view the updates after copying across the new properties file, select the language plugin for your translation, then restart Confluence and refresh your browser.

Building The Language Pack Plugin

To build the new language pack plugin, execute Ant in the confluence\src\etc\languages directory:

ant -Dlanguage=<LANGUAGE> build

A JAR will be created in the languages/<LANGUAGE>/dist/ folder.

Installation On A Confluence Server

To install the translation in another instance of Confluence.

  1. Copy languages-<KEY>.jar into the <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL-DIRECTORY>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib of your target installation

  2. Restart Confluence

  3. From your browser, login as an Administrator, then go to Administration -> Language and select the translation

Submitting A Translation (Optional)

If you would like to share your completed translation with other Confluence users, you can upload it here.

By providing Atlassian permission to bundle complete translations with the Confluence install you will soon be able to select your local language from the Confluence translations list under System Administration, without needing to package it as a plugin.

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Comments (6)

 

  1. Jan 25, 2007

    문태준 says:

    Hi! I use confluence 2.3.1 (current version). I want to new language pack. conf...

    Hi!

    I use confluence 2.3.1 (current version).
    I want to new language pack.
    confluence is working properly.
    The error is "build.xml does not exist".
    where i find build.xml?
    I don't know Java.

    [root@wiki languages]# pwd
/usr/local/src/confluence-2.3.1-std/languages
[root@wiki languages]# ant -Dlanguage=ko_KR build
Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed

    I know korea language pack. But this pack is not perfect.

    1. Jan 28, 2007

      David Loeng says:

      You can get this build.xml file from one of the 2.2.x distributions. We no lon...

      You can get this build.xml file from one of the 2.2.x distributions.

      We no longer bundle this language pack in 2.3.x.

      Cheers,
      Dave

      1. Jan 28, 2007

        문태준 says:

        Thank's you! My work! Download confluence2.2.10 unzip the file # ls aF confl...

        Thank's you!

        My work!
        Download confluence-2.2.10
        unzip the file

        # ls -aF confluence-2.2.10-std/languages/
./  ../  build.xml  de_DE/  ja_JP/  lib/  project.properties  readme.txt  ru_RU/  WARNING.TXT

        copy build.xml, project.properties, lib (directory) to confluence-2.3.1-std/languages directory.

        I don't know that the lib directory is needed.

        After this work, error is not found.

        I think that this error is added to manual.

        Sorry, My poor english!

  2. Nov 29, 2007

    Anonymous says:

    Hi, I want to add a new language to confluence 2.6.2. There are several inconsis...

    Hi,

    I want to add a new language to confluence 2.6.2. There are several inconsistancies with this tutarial.

    1. There is no languages folder in the install directory. I guess that this is no big problem. I made a folder called languages

    2. When I run ant -Dlanguage=en_AU build in the languages folder I get the error message " 'ant' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
    operable program or batch file."

    3. So i navigate to to C:\confluence-2.6.2\tools\ant\bin (there is a ant.bat file)  and run the command ant -Dlanguage=C:\confluence-2.6.2\languages\e
    n_AU build

    4. I get the error message

    Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
    Build failed

    Can someone please point me in the right direction. I tried everything I can think of.

    thanks in advance.

  3. Jan 07, 2008

    Eric Salonen says:

    Hi, We wish to translate Confluence into finnish, but when I unzip the latest ve...

    Hi,

    We wish to translate Confluence into finnish, but when I unzip the latest version of Confluence (2.7), there is no \WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\core\ -folder from where I can copy the latest ConfluenceActionSupport.properties file that is mentioned in point 2 of the "Updating the language pack" -section.

    Is there a mistake in this guide or am I not understanding correctly? Any advice please, will be much appreciated.

    Eric Salonen

    1. Jan 08, 2008

      Choy Li Tham says:

      Hi Eric, To my understanding, for Confluence version 2.6 onwards, the {{Conflue...

      Hi Eric,

      To my understanding, for Confluence version 2.6 onwards, the ConfluenceActionSupport.properties file is stored in the confluence-2.x.x.jar, which is located in the <confluence-install>/WEB-INF/lib directory. Hence, if you are keen to retrieve this properties file, give a try to make a copy of the *jar file and extract the copied JAR.

      Is there a mistake in this guide or am I not understanding correctly? Any advice please, will be much appreciated.

      We are in the process of updating the documentation that are related to Confluence version 2.6 and later. This improvement is being tracked at:

      You may want to add a comment to share your idea with the participants within the improvement request.

      Regards,
      Choy Li

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