Localization

Yelken allows you to create multiple locales representing different languages and regions of your visitors. To manage the locales of your website, you can navigate to Locales page located under Administration section of the main menu in App. In order to make any changes on locales, a user needs to have Admin permission.

In Yelken, locales are represented with their locale identifier, such as en for English. There must exist at least one locale and exactly one of them must be default locale. By default, Yelken comes with English (en) locale. When a visitor visits your website, Yelken tries to find the best matching one for the visitor’s locale. If there is no matching locale, the default one is used for rendering the website.

Under the hood, Yelken utilizes Fluent to handle localization. Each source can define a localization resource for a locale in fluent localization file format which is basically a collection of key-value pair of translation units that also support more advanced usecases like plural form of words.

In terms of managing locales in the App, you can delete a non-default locale, set another locale as default one, create a new one or edit an existing one. Besides that, when you go into details of a locale, you can see links for translations defined in different sources: global namespace, each theme’s own translations, and user created translations for each theme.

When you want to have a translation unit for a locale available for use regardless of the active theme, you can define it in global namespace for the locale. Otherwise, you can keep this translation unit scoped to a theme and only use it when that theme become active.

Contrary to layer concept, localization resources have a slightly different layering approach. All the translation units defined in different sources are merged into a single one. If two sources have a translation unit identified with same key, the one whose source has higher order will be used. Let’s consider that we have a translation unit hello = Hello for en locale defined in theme’s localization resource. To override this translation with hello = Hello!, we can define it in global namespace. Moreover, to override the translation in global namespace with hello = Hello Everybody!, we can define it in the theme’s namespace which has higher order than both theme’s original translations and global namespace’s translations.