Translating Zabbix

The Zabbix frontend is available in various languages, and that is a great achievement of the community—the Zabbix company does not do most of the translations. This is also a great opportunity to get involved and make Zabbix available in your language. Zabbix uses the online tool Pootle, which is a very easy way to get started. For more advanced contributors, po files can be downloaded and used with standalone tools. If you have decided to improve or create Zabbix support for your language, here are a few general suggestions:

• It can be a lot of work; be ready for that.
• Before starting, discuss the current state with existing translators for your language, if there are any.
• Think carefully about how the terms could be translated—how would you translate host, item, trigger, action, operation, and other entities?
• Don't try to translate the Zabbix manual right away—once the frontend has been fully translated and maintained for a while, manual translation can be considered. Translating and maintaining the Zabbix manual is a huge amount of work, and there is no language that has yet had a successful long-term translation of the manual.

Note

If a language you want to work on is available to translate but does not appear in the frontend language selection, it might be hidden. You can enable a language by editing the include/locales.inc.php file and changing the display property from false to true.

 

 

The exact steps and procedure for participating in the translation work may change, so I won't reproduce them here. Instead, go to http://zabbix.org/wiki/Translating_Zabbix and follow the steps there. It will likely include registering on the http://zabbix.org/wiki/Main_Page Wiki, adding yourself to the translator table, subscribing to the translator mailing list, and asking for permissions on Pootle. The latter is probably best done on the Zabbix IRC channel, and that is also the best place to ask any questions about getting involved in the translation process.