Starting a new language pack
If Moodle is not yet translated into your language and you would like to help, please create an account on the Translation site and contact our Moodle translation coordinator, Koen Roggemans, translation@moodle.org.
Once your language pack has been set up, you can follow the instructions provided in Maintaining a language pack.
First:
- Make sure langconfig is properly set up.
- Take a look at Translation priority. All files have a rating according to how urgent they need translating.
If you have any questions about using AMOS, please post in the Using AMOS forum.
Starting a child language of an existing language pack
If your country uses a variation of an existing language, that has a few (or many) differences from an existing language (ie, Canadian French is a variation of French, or US English has some spelling differences from UK English), a child language might be a good solution, as only the strings that need changes have to be uploaded to AMOS. Some examples of existing child languages and the changes from the parent language for Moodle 2.7 are:
- Català (Valencià) , 4438 changes from ca
- Deutsch community , 262 changes from de_du
- Deutsch - Du , 899 changes from de
- Deutsch - Kids , 235 changes from de_du
- English - Pirate , 1721 changes from en
- English for kids , 82 changes from en
- English - United States , 514 changes from en
- Finlandssvenska , 3379 changes from sv
- Français - Canada , 1029 changes from fr
- Hebrew kids , 1231 changes from he
- Japanese kids , 32 changes from ja.
- Lithuanian (university) , 14441 changes from lt
- Norsk - nynorsk , 3275 changes from no
- Spanish Mexico for kids , 75 changes from es_mx
- Suomi Filipino , 940 changes from tl
- Wolof , 119 changes from fr
If your local language only has a few differences from an existing language, it still qualifies as a different language for Moodle, and it can have its own language pack (if someone is willing to create and maintain it).
Defining the language code
For historical reasons we use the ISO-639-1 code for the representation of the language. If that doesn't exist, we use the ISO639-3 code (e.g. Moroccan Tamazight). In some exceptional cases, like the Occitan languages, we combine the ISO 639-1 code with the ISO 639-6 code, eg oc_gsc (keep in mind that the ISO 639-6 standard is withdrawn). Other exceptions includes the _kids addition for language packs for very young children and some other exceptions. These exceptions should be kept to a minimum.
