Translate Obsidian

Help translate Obsidian into your language.

Add a new language

To add a new language, follow these steps:

1. Copy all of the content of the raw en.json: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-translations/master/en.json
2. Paste into here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-translations/new/master
3. Translate some strings to your language
4. Find the language code of the language you're contributing: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
5. Name the new file "[language code].json" and submit

Staying up-to-date

Merge conflicts are nasty. They happen when you're translating an outdated version of the template, part of which might have been translated by someone else. To prevent this, try to fork our repository right before you translate.

If you want to do multiple translation pull requests, before doing work each time, use the "Compare" UI on your own fork to pull in all the newest changes from obsidianmd:master first by creating a pull request on your own repository and merge it in yourself, so that your own copy is up-to-update.

Submit changes

To translate, fork this repo and edit the JSON file of your language. After that, submit a pull request.

Note that you don't have to clone your fork to make the edits; you can do everything on GitHub's web UI. Simply open a file in your own forked repo and click on the pencil icon to start editing.

Translating

The translation JSON file consists of key-value pairs. The key should give you a good idea of where the text is in the app.

To translate, simply edit the value. For example, let's say you see

"plugin": "Plugin"

Simply change it to:

"plugin": "pLU9IN"

where "pLU9IN" is the phrase "plugin" in the target language. I'm using leetspeak as an example here.

If you encounter something like

"label-welcome": "Welcome, {{name}}!"

leave the {{name}} part alone and do not translate it. "name" is not part of the text and will be replaced by the appropriate value when the app runs.

Translating an update

From time to time, we'll add new strings to all the language files. The new strings will be in English and ready to be translated to your language of choice.

Update commits usually have message in the format of "Update strings for 1.x.x" where "1.x.x" is the new version number. This is an example commit: Update strings for 1.2.7.

By examining what happened to your language file, you can find the new strings to translate.

Translate a missing phrase on the UI

If you spot a missing phrase while using Obsidian, here's what to do:

1. Figure out where the language file lives by looking up the language table in the README under the "Existing languages" section.
2. Edit the language file, look for the exact English phrase.
3. Replace it with the appropriate translated phrase.
4. Submit your changs as a pull request.

Testing translation

Once you have the JSON file, you can test it by opening up developer console and enter selectLanguageFileLocation(). The app will prompt you for a JSON file location. After that, the app will reboot itself with the selected translation JSON file applied.

To revert to using the default language pack, open developer console and enter localStorage.removeItem('language').

Existing languages

Here is a table of language code to language name, in alphabetical order. These languages have their template files ready, but are not necessarily ready to be used in the app.

Language code	Language name	Native name	Status
en (default)	English	English	✅
af	Afrikaans	Afrikaans	🚧
am	Amharic	አማርኛ	✅
ar	Arabic	العربية	🚧
eu	Basque	Euskara	🚧
be	Belarusian	беларуская мова	🚧
bg	Bulgarian	български език	🚧
bn	Bengali	বাংলা	🚧
ca	Catalan	català	🚧
cs	Czech	čeština	✅
da	Danish	Dansk	✅
de	German	Deutsch	✅
el	Greek	Ελληνικά	🚧
eo	Esperanto	Esperanto	🚧
es	Spanish	Español	✅
fa	Persian	فارسی	✅
fi-fi	Finnish	suomi	🚧
fr	French	français	✅
gl	Galician	Galego	🚧
he	Hebrew	עברית 🇮🇱	🚧
hi	Hindi	हिन्दी	🚧
hu	Hungarian	Magyar nyelv	🚧
id	Indonesian	Bahasa Indonesia	✅
it	Italian	Italiano	✅
ja	Japanese	日本語	✅
ko	Korean	한국어	✅
lv	Latvian	Latviešu valoda	🚧
ml	Malayalam	മലയാളം	🚧
ms	Malay	Bahasa Melayu	🚧
nl	Dutch	Nederlands	✅
no	Norwegian	Norsk	✅
oc	Occitan	Occitan	🚧
pl	Polish	język polski	✅
pt	Portuguese	Português	✅
pt-BR	Brazilian Portuguese	Portugues do Brasil	✅
ro	Romanian	Română	🚧
ru	Russian	Русский	✅
sr	Serbian	српски језик	🚧
se	Swedish	Svenska	🚧
sk	Slovak	Slovenčina	🚧
sq	Albanian	Shqip	✅
ta	Tamil	தமிழ்	🚧
te	Telugu	తెలుగు	🚧
th	Thai	ไทย	✅
tr	Turkish	Türkçe	✅
uk	Ukrainian	Українська	🚧
ur	Urdu	اردو	🚧
vi	Vietnamese	Tiếng Việt	✅
zh (see note below)	Chinese (Simplified)	简体中文	✅
zh-TW	Chinese (Traditional)	繁體中文	✅

Note: the Chinese translation is maintained by Obsidian.zh. If you want to discuss it, please come here: https://github.com/obsidianzh/obsidian-translations.