I18n

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:

index.html

<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.properties

welcome_message = Hello, welcome to my website

/cms-current-locale.json

{"welcome_message": "Hello, welcome to my website"}

/cms-current-locale.yml

welcome_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, .json or .properties).
Name that file the locale that matches it. This locale should be a in the format language[_territory]. For example, general English is en and English specific to New Zealand should be en_NZ.
Use the current locale as a template and update the values for the new locale.
Add each file to the _locales directory in the root of your site.

Here are some example locales:

/_locales/de.properties

welcome_message = Hallo, herzlich willkommen auf meiner Webseite

/_locales/es.properties

welcome_message = Hola, bienvenido a mi p&aacute;gina 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:

index.html

<html class="language-en_nz">

Using CSS you can alter anything from font-size to text direction:

styles.css

/* Arabic */
.language-ar .content {
  direction: rtl;
}

Run some custom JavaScript based on language

script.js

const htmlElement = document.documentElement;
const languageClass = htmlElement.className.match(/language-([^\s]+)\b/);

if (languageClass) {
  console.log(languageClass[1]);
} else {
  console.log('Using default locale');
}

Post Processing

CloudCannon Integration

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