minikube/site/content/en/docs/Contributing/translations.md

---
title: "Translations"
date: 2019-09-30
weight: 3
description: >
  How to add translations
---

All translations are stored in the top-level `translations` directory.

### Adding a New Language
* Add a new json file in the translations directory with the locale code of the language you want to add
  translations for, e.g. fr for French.
	```
	~/minikube$ touch translations/fr.json
	~/minikube$ ls translations/
	de.json		es.json		fr.json		ja.json		ko.json		pl.json		zh-CN.json
	```
* Run `make extract` from root to populate that file with the strings to translate in json
  form.
	```
	~/minikube$ make extract
	go run cmd/extract/extract.go
	Compiling translation strings...
	Writing to de.json
	Writing to es.json
	Writing to fr.json
	Writing to ja.json
	Writing to ko.json
	Writing to pl.json
	Writing to zh-CN.json
	Done!
	```
* Add translated strings to the json file as the value of the map where the English phrase is the key.
	```
	~/minikube$ head translations/fr.json 
	{
		"\"The '{{.minikube_addon}}' addon is disabled": "",
		"\"{{.machineName}}\" does not exist, nothing to stop": "",
		"\"{{.name}}\" profile does not exist, trying anyways.": "",
		"'none' driver does not support 'minikube docker-env' command": "",
		"'none' driver does not support 'minikube mount' command": "",
		"'none' driver does not support 'minikube podman-env' command": "",
		"'none' driver does not support 'minikube ssh' command": "",
		"'{{.driver}}' driver reported an issue: {{.error}}": "",
	```
	* Add the translations as the values of the map, keeping in mind that anything in double braces `{{}}` are variable names describing what gets injected and should not be translated.
	```
	~/minikube$ vi translations/fr.json
	{
        	[...]
        	"Amount of time to wait for a service in seconds": "",
        	"Amount of time to wait for service in seconds": "",
        	"Another hypervisor, such as VirtualBox, is conflicting with KVM. Please stop the other hypervisor, or use --driver to switch to it.": "",
        	"Automatically selected the {{.driver}} driver": "Choix automatique du driver {{.driver}}",
        	"Automatically selected the {{.driver}} driver. Other choices: {{.alternates}}": "Choix automatique du driver {{.driver}}. Autres choix: {{.alternatives}}",
        	"Available Commands": "",
        	"Basic Commands:": "",
        	"Because you are using docker driver on Mac, the terminal needs to be open to run it.": "",
        	[...]
	}
        ```
	
### Adding Translations To an Existing Language
* Run `make extract` to make sure all strings are up to date
* Edit the appropriate json file in the 'translations' directory, in the same way as described above.

### Testing translations
* Once you have all the translations you want, save the file and rebuild the minikube from scratch to pick up your new translations:
	```
	~/minikube$ make clean
	rm -rf ./out
	rm -f pkg/minikube/assets/assets.go
	rm -f pkg/minikube/translate/translations.go
	rm -rf ./vendor
	~/minikube$ make
	```
	Note: the clean is required to regenerate the embedded `translations.go` file

* You now have a fresh minikube binary in the `out` directory. If your system locale is that of the language you added translations for, a simple `out/minikube start` will work as a test, assuming you translated phrases from `minikube start`. You can use whatever command you'd like in that way. 

* If you have a different system locale, you can override the printed language using the LANG environment variable:
	```
	~/minikube$ LANG=fr out/minikube start
	😄  minikube v1.9.0-beta.2 sur Darwin 10.14.6
	✨  Choix automatique du driver hyperkit
	🔥  Création de VM hyperkit (CPUs=2, Mémoire=4000MB, Disque=20000MB)...
	🐳  Préparation de Kubernetes v1.18.0 sur Docker 19.03.8...
	🌟  Installation des addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
	🏄  Terminé ! kubectl est maintenant configuré pour utiliser "minikube".
	```