CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there a language file somewhere?

I need to change the verbage for some of the contribution pages to something else.

I am just finishing setting up a charity event on a Joomla/Civicrm installation.  I am using the membership feature for vendors and sponsors.  They get a listing on the site for a certain amount of time and I thought that would be the easiest way to do it.

Yes, but my question was where are those files?

CiviCRM localisation uses the standard OpenSource gettext approach. This means that all of the localisable strings (pieces of text) appearing anywhere in CiviCRM are kept in one 'POT' file (civicrm.pot), which serves as a 'template' for different 'PO' files (civicrm.po) - one for every language. This way, the fact that CiviCRM is localised into a given language is equivalent to the fact that there exists a civicrm.po file for the language in question.

Create a subdirectory in your CiviCRM installation under the l10n directory, named with the locale code for your translation (e.g. xx_XX).

I can follow directions, it would just be nice if the directions gave location of the starting point so I didn't have to look through every single folder in this massive component.

Actually, what you need to do is make a custom PO file with just the localisation changes you require (you can start by copying the appropriate POT file(s) from our repository.

After you make the file, say, like this:

msgid "Contributions"
msgstr "Gifts"

msgid "Memberships"
msgstr "Assignments"

msgid "Grants"
msgstr "Offers"

you need to save it (say, as a civicrm.po file), compile with msgfmt like this:

msgfmt -o civicrm.mo civicrm.po

and, finally, create a l10n/en_XX/LC_MESSAGES subdirectory and put the compiled MO file there. From now on, you should have a ‘en_XX’ option to choose on the localisation page in Administer CiviCRM.