Achievement Stats » About AchStats » Translation Tutorial

Translation Tutorial

Are you a fan of AchStats and want to help out by maintaining a translation? Great! Read on to find out how to translate the site into a new language.

Get the language files

Start by grabbing the INI files containing all the language strings. You can download them here:
https://achievementstats.com/languages/
Pick your favorite translation base and be sure to save them as UTF-8! The German and English ones are maintained by us and are in doubt always up to date.

Identify your language codes

Each translation has an identifier consisting of two codes in the format of xx-XX according to RFC 1766. The first (lower-case) part is the linguistic classification and the second (upper-case) part identifies the geographical classification. Both are specified by ISO standards:

xx: ISO 639-1
XX: ISO 3166-1

Use the final code as your folder name.

The file format

All rules of INI files apply: Key–value pairs separated by = and each value enclosed by " signs. On top of that some conventions:

XHTML is enabled, i.e. all entities need proper escaping, e.g. & as & or " as "
Variable syntax (%s, %d, %f, %%, %F etc.) is based on sprintf() and indicated by x in the key
Date formats are specified by strftime(). Change it according to your local notation.
If your date format starts with the day instead of month or year, change the value of DATE_SORTABLE_CLASS to sortable-date-dmy.
There is a difference between lower- and upper-case keys. Example:
- encoding would translate to "Encoding" (translation of the word encoding)
- ENCODING would translate to "UTF-8" (encoding to use for this translation)
Always use UTF-8 and if you know what BOM is, don't use it.
By translating all the strings, insert a new one in the About.ini: x_for_<yourLangHere>_translation = "%s for <yourLangHere> translation"
Change the value of XHTML_DIRECTION to rtl in case your writing system is right-to-left.

Submit your translation

Once you're done, send all the files to our contact address with the language code (see above) mentioned in the subject:

We will check your submission and put it online. From there you can review it live on the site and send again any corrections or upcoming updates. You can always verify the translation progress with this handy tool! You will be notified additionally on every release with new strings.

Additional resources

These resources are listed here for completeness, but are not officially maintained by the AchStats team.