Internationalization

Internationalization (often abbreviated i18n since there are 18 characters between the first “i” and the last “n” in that word) allows Evennia’s core server to return texts in other languages than English - without anyone having to edit the source code.

Language-translations are done by volunteers, so support can vary a lot depending on when a given language was last updated. Below are all languages (besides English) with some level of support. Generally, any language not updated after Sept 2022 will be missing some translations.

Language Code	Language	Last updated
de	German	Aug 2024
es	Spanish	Aug 2019
fr	French	Dec 2022
it	Italian	Oct 2022
ko	Korean (simplified)	Sep 2019
la	Latin	Feb 2021
pl	Polish	Apr 2024
pt	Portugese	Oct 2022
ru	Russian	Apr 2020
sv	Swedish	Sep 2022
zh	Chinese (simplified)	May 2019

Language translations are found in the evennia/locale folder. Read below if you want to help improve an existing translation of contribute a new one.

Changing server language

Change language by adding the following to your mygame/server/conf/settings.py file:

    USE_I18N = True
    LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'

Here 'en' (the default English) should be changed to the abbreviation for one of the supported languages found in locale/ (and in the list above). Restart the server to activate i18n.

Important

Even for a ‘fully translated’ language you will still see English text in many places when you start Evennia. This is because we expect you (the developer) to know English (you are reading this manual after all). So we translate hard-coded strings that the end player may see - things you can’t easily change from your mygame/ folder. Outputs from Commands and Typeclasses are generally not translated, nor are console/log outputs.

To cut down on work, you may consider only translating the player-facing commands (look, get etc) and leave the default admin commands in English. To change the language of some commands (such as look) you need to override the relevant hook-methods on your Typeclasses (check out the code for the default command to see what it calls).

Windows users

If you get errors concerning gettext or xgettext on Windows, see the Django documentation. A self-installing and up-to-date version of gettext for Windows (32/64-bit) is available on Github as gettext-iconv-windows.

Translating Evennia

Translations are found in the core evennia/ library, under evennia/evennia/locale/. You must make sure to have cloned this repository from Evennia’s github before you can proceed.

If you cannot find your language in evennia/evennia/locale/ it’s because no one has translated it yet. Alternatively you might have the language but find the translation bad … You are welcome to help improve the situation!

To start a new translation you need to first have cloned the Evennia repository with GIT and activated a python virtualenv as described on the Setup Quickstart page.

Go to evennia/evennia/ - that is, not your game dir, but inside the evennia/ repo itself. If you see the locale/ folder you are in the right place. Make sure your virtualenv is active so the evennia command is available. Then run

 evennia makemessages --locale <language-code>

where <language-code> is the two-letter locale code for the language you want to translate, like ‘sv’ for Swedish or ‘es’ for Spanish. After a moment it will tell you the language has been processed. For instance:

 evennia makemessages --locale sv

If you started a new language, a new folder for that language will have emerged in the locale/ folder. Otherwise the system will just have updated the existing translation with eventual new strings found in the server. Running this command will not overwrite any existing strings so you can run it as much as you want.

Next head to locale/<language-code>/LC_MESSAGES and edit the **.po file you find there. You can edit this with a normal text editor but it is easiest if you use a special po-file editor from the web (search the web for “po editor” for many free alternatives), for example:

- [gtranslator](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gtranslator)
- [poeditor](https://poeditor.com/)

The concept of translating is simple, it’s just a matter of taking the english strings you find in the **.po file and add your language’s translation best you can. Once you are done, run

`evennia compilemessages`

This will compile all languages. Check your language and also check back to your .po file in case the process updated it - you may need to fill in some missing header fields and should usually note who did the translation.

When you are done, make sure that everyone can benefit from your translation! Make a PR against Evennia with the updated **.po file. Less ideally (if git is not your thing) you can also attach it to a new post in our forums.

Hints on translation

Many of the translation strings use { ... } placeholders. This is because they are to be used in .format() python operations. While you can change the order of these if it makes more sense in your language, you must not translate the variables in these formatting tags - Python will look for them!

Original: "|G{key} connected|n"
Swedish:  "|G{key} anslöt|n"

You must also retain line breaks at the start and end of a message, if any (your po-editor should stop you if you don’t). Try to also end with the same sentence delimiter (if that makes sense in your language).

Original: "\n(Unsuccessfull tried '{path}')."
Swedish: "\nMisslyckades med att nå '{path}')."

Finally, try to get a feel for who a string is for. If a special technical term is used it may be more confusing than helpful to translate it, even if it’s outside of a {...} tag. A mix of English and your language may be clearer than you forcing some ad-hoc translation for a term everyone usually reads in English anyway.

Original: "\nError loading cmdset: No cmdset class '{classname}' in '{path}'.
           \n(Traceback was logged {timestamp})"
Swedish:  "Fel medan cmdset laddades: Ingen cmdset-klass med namn '{classname}' i {path}.
           \n(Traceback loggades {timestamp})"