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Internationalization

Tags: i18n translation internationalization language


(8.74) Documentation » Features » i18n

Internationalization (i18n)

Internationalization in computer science means the process of making a computer program ready to support many languages (have the interface translated in to different languages which the user can select according to his/her preferences, showing content or menus for some languages but not others, etc.).

TIP:
It is often also known as "i18n" (since the word internationalization is quite long, but is the most common word starting with an I, followed by 18 more characters, and ending with an n: i+18+n = "i18n").

A similar approach was followed with the word localization (the process of making a new translation for a local language in an internationalized software) as "l10n" (= l+10+n).

Note: TikiWiki installations meant to handle languages other than English should have an installation that creates a utf8 database.

Overview

TikiWiki supports many languages. The list and the status of the strings translations for the Tiki interface are updated on: http://tikiwiki.org/TikiWikiInternationalizationAndLanguages (external link)

. The strings are the messages and the menu labels.

As an administrator, you can build a monolingual site other than an English one or a multilingual site.
As a user, you can view a multilingual site in you favorite language, and have pages translated into other languages. Starting in Tikiwiki 1.10, it will be MUCH easier for your community to keep wiki pages updated and synchronized among all translations.

Note

As of TikiWiki release 1.9, all language files could be added and removed using the Mods system. This means that you could choose which languages are available on your site through using the Mods interface. However, most languages are still included by default in tiki installation by users commodity, since Mods feature is still quite new and many users haven't used it yet.