Make your website more accessible to an international audience. i18n is an abbreviation for the word internationalization. It can be broken down to the following:
- i (the first letter of the word)
- 18 characters
- n (the last letter of the word)
This is a form of abbreviation known as a Numeronym. Globalization (G11n) is sometimes used interchangeably with i18n.
Internationalization (i18n) on CloudCannon allows you to translate your site into different languages.
You can enable Internationalization in Site Settings / i18n.
Tagging content for translation#
First we must add a key to each element we want internationalised. To do this add a data-i18n attribute with a unique key.
For example:
<h2 class="editable" data-i18n="welcome_message">Hello, welcome to my website</h2>
Obtaining the current locale#
Once you have tagged the elements that need translation, CloudCannon can generate a lookup of the content. CloudCannon supports three file extensions: .json, .yml and .properties. These files are called locales.
To obtain the current locale, you can visit any of these URLs on your site:
-
/cms-current-locale.propertieswelcome_message = Hello, welcome to my website -
/cms-current-locale.json{"welcome_message": "Hello, welcome to my website"} -
/cms-current-locale.ymlwelcome_message: "Hello, welcome to my website"
Providing alternative locales#
Once you have the current locale, you can start creating new ones.
For each new locale:
- Create the file with your chosen format (either
.yml,.jsonor.properties). - Name that file the locale that matches it. This locale should be a in the format
language[_territory]. For example, general English isenand English specific to New Zealand should been_NZ. - Use the current locale as a template and update the values for the new locale.
- Add each file to the
_localesdirectory in the root of your site.
Here are some example locales:
-
/_locales/de.propertieswelcome_message = Hallo, herzlich willkommen auf meiner Webseite -
/_locales/es.propertieswelcome_message = Hola, bienvenido a mi página web
CloudCannon generates a new version of the HTML per locale and routes visitors based on their Accept-Language header and country.
Detecting the current locale#
CloudCannon automatically injects the viewers locale into the HTML elements class as it is served.
If a site has en_NZ support and the viewer accepts that language it looks like:
<html class="language-en_nz">
Using CSS you can alter anything from font-size to text direction:
/* Arabic */
.language-ar .content {
direction: rtl;
}
Run some custom JavaScript based on language
const htmlElement = document.documentElement;
const languageClass = htmlElement.className.match(/language-([^\s]+)\b/);
if (languageClass) {
console.log(languageClass[1]);
} else {
console.log('Using default locale');
}