Introduction

Our system was designed with multi-lingual support from the start but we understand that not everyone needs multiple languages or that translations may need to be integrated later.

Translations may be either messages or entire pages; which approach you choose depends upon the type of content you want to translate and the design of your project. For messages project fluent is used as it is an excellent modern design for managing natural language translations.

We imagine that a good multi-lingual project would take advantage of both styles of translation. Messages are best suited to interface text that makes up part of the layout of your project whilst using translated pages is best suited to long-form content.

Fallback

Every project must define a language in the site settings:

lang = "fr"

This is called the primary or fallback language and is the language used when no translation is available.

Locales

Message translations are .ftl files in the site/locales directory, here is an example layout showing files for several languages:

site/locales
├── core.ftl
├── en
│   └── main.ftl
├── es
│   └── main.ftl
└── fr
    └── main.ftl

Redirect

When multiple languages are defined in the locales directory then the project is automatically treated as a multi-lingual project in which case the build will contain multiple language directories:

build/debug
├── en
├── es
└── fr

Which means that multi-lingual projects need to add a redirect in the project site settings for the default language:

[redirect]
"/" = "/fr/"