Skip to main content
Editing Project Languages

Modify your project's target languages.

Nina Eleftheriadou avatar
Written by Nina Eleftheriadou
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes, you'll need to translate a project to more languages or change the languages a project is being translated to.

šŸ“ Note: Adding or removing languages from a project affects all the resources within that project and your organization's total word count.

Administrators and Project Maintainers can change project languages. (If your vendor is assigned as a Team Manager in the project, they won't be able to add a new language to a project). More information about the user roles in Transifex and each role's permissions can be found here.

Languages can be added or removed on a project level. Adding or removing languages from a specific project does not affect the other projects of your organization. So, if you need to add a new language to all projects, you must do it individually for each project.


Adding project languages

To add a language:

  1. Pick the project you want to edit from the project navigation in the Dashboard.

  2. Click on Languages.

  3. Click the Edit Languages button.

  4. Select one or more languages to add to the project from the languages dropdown at the top of the popup.

    You can search for a specific language using either language's name or language locale. You can search for a language either using their full name, their language code, or any words contained in their full description, e.g., you can type "Egypt" to find "Arabic (Egypt) (ar_EG)".

  5. Click Apply when done to finalize the changes.

If you can't find the language you need in the drop-down menu, click on Show all languages. (For example, you're looking for German (Switzerland)
ā€‹

You will find the needed locale there:

šŸ“ Using a Consistent Source Language

When adding a source language, make sure you stay consistent across all your projects: e.g., if you choose the generic ā€œenā€ in your first project, select it in all subsequent projects that you or your team members create later. This will help such great features as Translation Memory, Translation Memory Groups and Glossary work fine and be shared across all your projects.

When adding target languages, we recommend staying consistent with the language code and choosing a locale-specific target language (e.g., es_ES vs. es). (More about language codes and locales can be found here).


Removing project languages

To remove a language:

  1. Pick the project you want to edit from the project navigation in the Dashboard.

  2. Click on Languages.

  3. Click the Edit Languages button.

  4. In the popup, you'll see a list of current project languages. Hover over a language you'd like to delete and click the x to mark it for removal.

  5. After selecting all the languages you'd like to remove, check the box at the bottom of the popup that says "Removing a language from project..."

  6. Click Apply when done to finalize the changes.

šŸ“ Note: If you delete a language from your project, all the TM entries will be preserved and available as TM suggestions for future translations. More information can be found here.


Searching and sorting project languages

While in the languages page, some search or sort languages options exist. These options are placed on top of the languages list, along with some informational counters for the languages.

languages-search-sorting.png#asset:4254

The languages counters on top of the list display the total number of languages, languages that do not have translators to localize them, and the number of languages that the localization is completed. On the right side is information about issues on strings and requested languages.

Below the informational header, you can search for a specific language by typing the language name. The list will update automatically as you type to display language matches.

On the right of the search bar, there are some options to sort the languages list in ascending or descending order by:

  • Name of the language

  • Last activity on the language

  • Completion of localization actions for that language.

šŸ“ Note: Completed languages are those that are translated and reviewed by your team. These languages are ready for use in your project.


Changing a target language

If you have already translated into a target language and then realized that this is not the correct locale and you would like to change the locale, here are the steps to change the target language:

  1. Download the existing translation files from Transifex. We recommend using the Download for translation option so that the untranslated strings remain empty and don't populate the English strings (as would happen with "Download for use") when the file gets uploaded back to your project in step 3.

  2. Add the new correct target language on the "Languages" page.

  3. Upload your existing translation files back to Transifex under the new target language.

  4. Once you confirm that everything looks fine (all translations have been applied to the new locale, and strings reviewed in the wrong language have also been reviewed in the new language), you can remove the wrong target language from your project.


Changing a source language

The source language is defined during the project creation step. So, a source language cannot be changed after the project has been created.

As a workaround, we suggest the following workflow:

  1. Download both the source and translation files from the existing project. You can easily do that via our Command-line Client. After it's installed:

    1. Initialize a Transifex project using tx init.

    2. Add resources to your configuration using tx add, starting an interactive setup.

    3. Pull source and translation files at once tx pull -s -a. The last command fetches all source and translation files at once.

  2. Create a new project and choose the correct source language for your project.

  3. Upload all the exported files under the new project - you can use Transifex Client again to upload all the files simultaneously.

    1. Download the TMX file from the old project, edit it, and replace the existing language code with the one you want to use.

    2. Go to the new projectā€™s settings page and upload the updated version of the TMX file.

    3. Enable the ā€œTranslation Memory Fill-upā€ option on the new project's workflow page.

    4. Upload all the source files in the new project.

    5. TM will detect all the 100% matches and automatically populate the translations to the untranslated entries.


šŸ’”Tip

Looking for more help? Get support from our Transifex Community Forum!

Find answers or post to get help from Transifex Support and our Community.

Did this answer your question?