Language and translation

Both the interface and content language can be changed to suit your needs.

Interface

The Interface Language controls the text on the site that isn’t part of your content files. You can choose from 35+ languages, with English being the default for new sites.

Available Language Packs

Choose from 35+ interface languages including:

  • عربي (ar)
  • Català (ca)
  • Česky (cs)
  • Dansk (da)
  • Deutsch (de)
  • Ελληνικά (el)
  • English (en)
  • Español (es)
  • Eesti (et)
  • Euskara (eu)
  • فارسی (fa)
  • Suomi (fi)
  • Français (fr)
  • עברית (he)
  • Magyar (hu)
  • Bahasa Indonesia (id)
  • Italiano (it)
  • 日本語 (ja)
  • ភាសាខ្មែរ (km)
  • 한국어 (ko)
  • Lietuvių (lt)
  • Latviešu (lv)
  • Norsk bokmål (nb)
  • Nederlands (nl)
  • Polski (pl)
  • Português (pt)
  • Română (ro)
  • Русский (ru)
  • Soomaali (so)
  • Svenska (sv)
  • Türkçe (tr)
  • Українська (uk)
  • Tiếng Việt (vi)
  • 中文 (简体) (zh)
  • 中文 (繁體) (zh-hant)

Setting the Language

Choose the languages you wish to use from the list above, noting their identifiers in brackets. Alternatively, a new language pack can be created by following the guide in the next section.

Follow the brief instructions in your config/_default/languages.yaml to configure which language packs you wish to use.

To change the default language, set defaultContentLanguage to the desired language identifier in your config.yaml file.

Create or Modify a Language Pack

The interface text is stored in dedicated language files so that the interface can be translated or edited.

To edit the interface text:

  1. Create an i18n folder at the root of your site
  2. Download a language file, such as the English file, to your i18n folder, so you have a path like i18n/en.yaml
  3. Open the language file and make any desired changes to the text appearing after translation:
  4. If it’s a new language pack, add the language name to the list of available languages

Language packs are structured in YAML, similar to Markdown front matter.

To translate the Wowchemy interface into a new language, follow the above instructions, but name the new file in the form i18n/XX.yaml where XX is the appropriate ISO/RFC5646 language identifier for the translation.

If you translate the interface into a new language, please consider contributing it by opening a Pull Request on our GitHub.

To translate the navigation bar for the site’s default language, you can edit the default menu links in config/_default/menus.yaml.

For a multilingual site, you can duplicate config/_default/menus.yaml to config/_default/menus.XX.yaml and translate its menu items, where XX is the language identifier (e.g. menus.zh.yaml for Simplified Chinese). Thus, the navigation bar can be displayed in multiple languages.

Content

In this section, you will learn how to create content in multiple languages.

Move all you existing content in content/ to a sub-folder named with the appropriate ISO/RFC5646 language identifier. For example, if your existing content is in English, move your content to content/en/.

To create content in an additional language, create a sub-folder in content/ named with the appropriate ISO/RFC5646 language identifier. Then place your translated content in here, just as you would for your primary language content.

If a page has been translated into multiple languages, a language chooser will appear in the navigation bar to allow the user to select which language they would like to view the page in.

You may also need to configure config/_default/languages.yaml with the relevant content directories. This can be performed by creating a config section for each language and setting its contentDir to the relevant path.

For further details on Hugo’s internationalization and multilingual features, refer to the associated Hugo documentation.

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Last updated on Oct 8, 2023