How translation works

How translation works

Splunk now supports internationalizing and localizing strings within the product. Use Splunk's localization tools to:

• Translate text generated by Python code, JavaScript code, views, menus and Mako templates.
• Set language/locale specific alternatives for static resources such as images, CSS, other media.
• Create new languages or locales.
• Format times, dates and other numerical strings.

Language detection

Splunk automatically detects every time you log in and uses whatever language your browser is set to. If you'd like to switch languages, change your browser settings.

Splunk detects locale strings. A locale string contains two components: a language specifier and a localization specifier. This is usually presented as two lowercase letters and two uppercase letters linked by an underscore. For example, en_US means US English or en_GB for British English. When looking for a suitable translation, Splunk first tries to find an exact match for the whole locale, but will fallback to just the language specifier the entire setting is not available. For example, translations for 'fr' answer to requests for fr_CA and fr_FR. The user's locale also affects how dates, times, numbers etc are formatted as different countries have differing standards on how these entities are formatted.

Relevant files

Translation information is stored in

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python2.6/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/

in the following three files:

• messages.pot
  • This file holds all of the strings that need to be translated; load this into your po editor to get started.
• locale/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po
  • Replace <local> is the locale you're translating to.
  • Your editor creates this file mapping source strings to the translation you provide.
• locale/</locale>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo
  • A machine readable version of messages.po that the system uses to find translated strings.
  • Your po editor should create this for you at the same time as the .po file.