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How to translate Kubeapps

Important: this is a work in progress feature. See the current progress at [https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/kubeapps/issues/2346]:

There are two ways to have Kubeapps with different messages: i) customizing the strings at runtime from the values.yaml file; ii) adding a new official translation into the Kubeapps project.

Customizing Kubeapps literals in runtime​

In case you want to use a custom translation (e.g., for adapting Kubeapps to your corporate needs), you only need to add json with the "message-id": "translation" you want to customize.

customLocale: |-
  {
    "Kubeapps": "My dashboard",
    ...
  }

Precompiled messages will result in a better overall application performance, instead of adding this json, you can follow the steps below.

Adding a new translation to the Kubeapps project​

The /dashboard/lang folder holds the current supported translations in Kubeapps. You can use one of these files, for instance, en.json, to generate the translation into your language.

Then, these json files are to be AST-compiled and served in the react app from the folder /dashboard/src/locales.

The process is as follows:

  1. Select a base file in the /dashboard/lang folder. For instance, en.json.
  2. Translate the strings into your language and save the document as XX.json, where XX is a two-letter ISO 639-1 code.
  3. Run yarn compile-lang to generate the AST-compiled strings, this will improve the application's performance.
  4. Add your language to the list of supported ones in the code.
  5. Feel free to contribute with a new language and send a PR :)

Developers should note that when adding a new literal, yarn extract-lang must be run.