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PrestaShop provides you with a full translation tool for your shop. This helps you add and edit your pages translations. This way, you are the master of your shop, and can handle your translated strings without having to wait for official translators to publish their corrections. Indeed, PrestaShop comes in many languages, and both the administration panel and the default theme are already translated in more than 20 languages.
Even if you do not want to correct the translators' work, you might want to change the wording they chose to use (less formal, less wordy, etc.), and customize the various available text, thus tailoring your website to your audience; for instance, a hip-hop clothing shop might be better off using different expressions from that of a luxury watches shop.
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The process of adapting a program to foreign languages is called internationalization and localization, or i18n and L10n for short. The PrestaShop team has chosen to use its own built-in translation tool, so that anyone with a PrestaShop installation may customize their shop to their needs. The official translation packs can be downloaded manually from this address: http://www.prestashop.com/en/translations. Join and help us so that PrestaShop is fully translated in your language too! |
Modifying a Translation
The most important tool of the "Translation" page is in the "Modify translations" section. This is where you can choose to edit add a translation, and completely customize each and every sentence if you wish so.
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Select the part of the current translation that you wish to edit:
- Front Office Theme translations. The text visible to your customers when browsing your store.
- Back Office translations. The text to you and your team from your store's administration panel.
- Error message E-mail template translations. The error messages that may appear on the front-office.
- Fields Names translations. The name of the fields in both the front-office and back office.
- Module translations. The terms used by the installed modules. Note that modules which are available but not installed will not appear in the tool.
- PDF translations. The terms used in the generated PDF files: invoices, delivery slips, etc.
- E-mail template translations. The terms used in the default e-mail templates.
- terms used in the default e-mail templates.
- Other translations. This category is meant to disappear in a coming version. It contains expressions that haven't been identified as being from the theme or the back office yet.
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If you are looking for a specific expression either in "Back office", "Theme" or "Email templates" sections, but you are unable to find it, it might be under the "Other translations" section. |
Some categories have a second drop-down list, which lists the available themes. PrestaShop themes have their own strings, but can also have their own modules, PDF templates and e-mail templates. The drop-down list therefore enables you to choose which theme you want to work with.
Once your selection is done, click the language code of the language in which you wish to edit that category of translation.
A long page then appears. It contains the hundreds of available strings for that category, sometimes split in tens of fieldsets.
By default, only the fieldsets which have untranslated strings are open. If you wish to open them all, click on the button on the top left twice: once to close all of them, once more to expand them all. You can open and close fieldsets one by one by clicking on its title.
Editing a translation is easy:
- Open a fieldset,
- Edit its content,
- Click on either the "Update Translations and stay" button to save while and keep translating more for this category, or on the "Update translation" button to save and return to the main "Translations" page.
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PrestaShop 1.5 introduced a new syntax where strings can contain Some strings use a special syntax with placeholders, such as When you find a string with such placeholder, it means that PrestaShop will replace it with an actual dynamic value before displaying the translated string. Technically, having placeholders prevents strings from being split in parts. Thereby, in previous version of PrestaShop, "Your order on %s is complete." would have been split in two: "Your order on" and "is complete.". While the literal translation of these worked for some language, it made translation nearly impossible for many other languages, none the less RTL languages such as Arabic or Hebrew. Thanks to the placeholders added in PrestaShop 1.5, such strings are now fully translatable in any language. |
Some strings might have a warning icon to their right. This indicates strings with placeholders. You can click on the icon to get more information.
In case of a string with a placeholder, you should make sure that the content of that placeholder will be placed in the correct flow of the sentence, and avoid literal translation.
Numbered placeholders (%1$s, %2$d, etc.) enable translators to rearrange the order of the placeholders in the string while maintaining the information each is replaced with. This way, a French translator could choose to translate "Order #%1$d from %2$s" into "Commande n°%1$s du %2$s" or "Le %2$s, commande n°%1$s".
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