docusaurus/docs/guides-translation.md

---
id: translation
title: Translations
---

Docusaurus allows for easy translation functionality using Crowdin. Documentation files written in English are uploaded to Crowdin for translation by users. Top-level pages written with English strings can be translated by wrapping any strings you want to translate in a `<translate>` tag. Other titles and labels will also be found and properly translated.

## Docusaurus Translation Configurations

To generate example files for translations with Docusuaurus, run the `examples` script with the command line argument `translations`:

```
npm run examples translations
```

This will create the following files:

```
pages/en/help-with-translations.js
languages.js
crowdin.yaml
```

The `pages/en/help-with-translations.js` file is the same example help page generated by the `examples` script but now using translations tags that are described below.
The `languages.js` file tells Docusaurus what languages you want to enable for your site.
The `crowdin.yaml` file is used to configure crowdin integration, and is copied out one level into your project repo.

## Writing Pages to be Translated

Any pages with text you want to be translated should go into the `website/pages/en` folder. Simply wrap any strings you want translated in a `<translate>` tag, and add the following `require` statement to the top of the file:
```jsx
...
const translate = require("../../server/translate.js").translate;
...
<h2>
  <translate>This is a Header I want translated</translate>
</h2>
...
```

You can also include an optional description attribute to give more context to a translator about how to translate the string:
```jsx
<p>
  <translate desc="flower, not verb">Rose</translate>
<p>
```

Documentation files do not need to be changed to support translations. They will be uploaded to Crowdin to be translated directly.

## Gathering Strings to Translate

Add the following script to your package.json file:
```json
...
"scripts": {
  "write-translations": "docusaurus-write-translations"
},
...
```

Running the script will generate a `website/i18n/en.json` file containing all the strings that will be translated from English into other languages.

The script will include text from the following places:

- `title` and `sidebar_label` strings in document markdown headers
- category names in `sidebars.json`
- tagline in `siteConfig.js`
- header link `label` strings in `siteConfig.js`
- strings wrapped in the `<translate>` tag in any `.js` files inside `pages`

## How Strings Get Translated

Docusaurus itself does not do any translation from one language to another. Instead, it uses [Crowdin](https://crowdin.com/) to manage translations and then downloads appropriately translated files from Crowdin. More information on how to set up Crowdin translations later.

## How Docusaurus Uses String Translations

This section provides some more context for how translation works, but is not necessary information for the user to know.

For things like the strings found in the headers and sidebars of pages, Docusaurus references a translated version of `i18n/en.json` (for example, a `i18n/fr.json` file downloaded from Crowdin).

For documentation text itself, fully translated markdown files will be compiled in the same way English documentation markdown files would be.

For other pages, Docusaurus will automatically transform all `<translate>` tags into function calls that will return appropriately translated strings. For each language that is enabled with `languages.js`, Docusaurus will build translated pages using the files in `pages/en` and the language's respective `.json` file in `i18n`.

## Crowdin Set-Up

Create your translation project on [Crowdin](https://www.crowdin.com/). You can use [Crowdin's guides](https://support.crowdin.com/translation-process-overview/) to learn more about the translations work flow.

To automatically get the translations for your files, update the `circle.yml` file in your project directory to include steps to upload English files to be translated and download translated files using the Crowdin CLI. Here is an example `circle.yml` file:

```yaml
machine:
  node:
    version: 6.10.3
  npm:
    version: 3.10.10

test:
  override:
    - "true"

deployment:
  website:
    branch: master
    commands:
      # configure git user
      - git config --global user.email "test-site-bot@users.noreply.github.com"
      - git config --global user.name "Website Deployment Script"
      - echo "machine github.com login test-site-bot password $GITHUB_TOKEN" > ~/.netrc
      # install Docusaurus and generate file of English strings
      - cd website && npm install && npm run write-translations && cd ..
      # crowdin install
      - sudo apt-get install default-jre
      - wget https://artifacts.crowdin.com/repo/deb/crowdin.deb -O crowdin.deb
      - sudo dpkg -i crowdin.deb
      # translations upload/download
      - crowdin --config crowdin.yaml upload sources --auto-update -b master
      - crowdin --config crowdin.yaml download -b master
      # build and publish website
      - cd website && GIT_USER=test-site-bot npm run publish-gh-pages
```

The `crowdin` command uses the `crowdin.yaml` file generated with the `examples` script. It should be placed in your project directory to configure how and what files are uploaded/downloaded.

Note that in the `crowdin.yaml` file, `CROWDIN_PROJECT_ID` and `CROWDIN_API_KEY` are environment variables set-up in Circle for your Crowdin project. They can be found in your Crowdin project settings.

Now, Circle will help you automatically get translations prior to building your website. The provided `crowdin.yaml` file will copy translated documents into `website/translated_docs/`, and translated versions of the `i18n/en.json` strings file will into `i18n/${language}.json`.

If you wish to use Crowdin on your machine locally, you can install the [Crowdin CLI tool](https://support.crowdin.com/cli-tool/) and run the same commands found in the `circle.yaml` file. The only difference is that you must set `project_identifier` and `api_key` values in the `crowdin.yaml` file since you will not have Circle environment variables set up. 

## Translations and Versioning

If you wish to have translation and versioning for your documentation, add the following section to the end of your `crowdin.yaml` file:

```yaml
  -
    source: '/website/versioned_docs/**/*.md'
    translation: '/website/translated_docs/%locale%/**/%original_file_name%'
    languages_mapping: *anchor
```

Translated, versioned documents will be copied into `website/translated_docs/${language}/${version}/`.