Translations - i18n & l10n

MISP and internationalization (i18n)

MISP is internationalized (i18n) and localized (l10n) using the standard gettext workflow provided by CakePHP. Every user-facing string in the interface is wrapped in a translation function, extracted into a translation template (default.pot), and translated per language under app/Locale/<lang>/LC_MESSAGES/default.po. MISP can be translated into more than 140 languages this way.

Translations are crowd-sourced through Crowdin — you no longer edit .po/.pot files by hand or open pull requests with translated files. The two audiences below cover almost everything:

  • Translators contribute and review translations online on Crowdin (no MISP checkout or local tooling required).
  • Developers make new strings translatable in the codebase so that Crowdin can pick them up.
Note

Crowdin replaced the older Transifex-based workflow. The project lives at crowdin.com/project/misp. Crowdin is an independent service with its own privacy policy.

Translating MISP (for translators)

You can help correct, improve, or complete the translation of MISP into your native language directly from a web browser:

  1. Open the MISP project on Crowdin: crowdin.com/project/misp.
  2. Log in (or create a free Crowdin account) and pick your target language.
  3. Translate strings in the online editor. Crowdin shows you the surrounding context, existing suggestions, and a translation memory so recurring phrases stay consistent.

If you are new to Crowdin, read their introduction for volunteer translators.

Important

Only reviewed translations are shipped with MISP. Once a string is translated it still needs to be proofread/approved by a reviewer before it is exported into the codebase and distributed in the next release. If you would like to become a reviewer for your language, reach out to the MISP team.

Style

Please follow whatever is the purest and most intelligible form of the written language being translated. Where a technical term has an established local form, prefer it; where the English term is what practitioners actually use, keeping it is fine — consistency within a language matters more than a strict rule.

Enabling a language on your instance

Translations reach an instance through the release cycle: reviewed strings on Crowdin are periodically exported to app/Locale/<lang>/LC_MESSAGES/default.po, compiled, and shipped with MISP. To select the interface language on a running instance, a site administrator sets the MISP.language server setting (default eng) under Administration → Server Settings & Maintenance → MISP settings. The dropdown is populated from the locales present in app/Locale/, so only languages that ship with your version are selectable. Changing it clears the relevant caches automatically.

Making MISP translatable (for developers)

New user-facing strings only become translatable if they are wrapped in CakePHP’s __() translation function. When you add or change a view, wrap the strings so that they are extracted into default.pot and appear on Crowdin. See the CakePHP documentation on i18n & l10n for the underlying mechanism.

A few conventions make the extracted strings far easier to translate.

Use named placeholders, not %s

This is hard to translate because the translator gets no context for the substituted value:

<p><?php echo __('Are you sure you want to delete Proposal #') . $id . '?' ?></p>

Prefer the format-string notation with a named placeholder — the generated msgid carries the variable name, which is far more meaningful to a translator than a bare %s, and it lets the translator reorder the sentence freely:

<p><?php echo __('Are you sure you want to delete Proposal #{$id}?'); ?></p>

Keep HTML out of translatable strings

Move HTML tags out of the sentence — and out of the PHP call where possible — so translators translate language, not markup. Instead of:

<p><?php echo __('<h1>Are you sure you want to:<br />Delete Proposal #%s?', $id); ?></h1></p>

write:

<p><h1><?php echo __('Are you sure you want to:%sDelete Proposal #{$id}?', '<br />'); ?></h1></p>

Wrap button labels and form labels

Untranslated labels are a common oversight. This label is not translatable:

echo $this->Form->button('Submit', array('class' => 'btn btn-primary'));

Wrap it:

echo $this->Form->button(__('Submit'), array('class' => 'btn btn-primary'));

The same applies to form inputs — this:

echo $this->Form->input('sharing_group_id', array(
    'options' => array($sharingGroups),
    'label' => 'Sharing Group',
));

becomes:

echo $this->Form->input('sharing_group_id', array(
    'options' => array($sharingGroups),
    'label' => __('Sharing Group'),
));

Issues

Sometimes a phrase is impossible to translate cleanly, or you notice bad formatting or awkward sentence segmentation in the source string. In that case, open an issue on GitHub so the source string can be fixed — that fixes it for every language at once.

Translating the website or this book

Interested in translating the MISP website or the MISP Book as well? Those are separate from the software translation on Crowdin — reach out to the MISP team and we will help you get set up.

Reach out to the community

Want to chat with other MISP contributors and translators? Join the MISP Gitter channel.