Adding a language to phpBB

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Adding a language to phpBB

How to add an additional language?

buksida

6:47 am on May 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

I have downloaded the language pack I need but want capabilities in both languages, can I do this or will the pack over write the English version already installed?

rogerd

2:28 am on May 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

Usually language is a choice between alternatives rather than multiple options, but I don't know how phpBB handles that. Anyone?

encyclo

12:19 pm on May 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

If you look in the

languages/

directory of your installation, you will probably see one other directory called

lang_english/

. Once you've downloaded your new new language pack, unzip it and you will have a directory for that particular language, say

lang_french/

All you have to do is to upload the files into the

languages/

directory on the server, and it will be available automatically in the drop-down list in the user profile. You can also set the default language for the board in the admin control panel. One important note: you should always keep the English language pack in place as it is the default if a language term is not available in your preferred language.

buksida

11:36 am on Jun 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the replies, have done as instructed with the language pack however it still doesnt read it (all gibberish). Do i need to add the character set meta tag in overall_header.php to whats below?

Or activate it in the Admin panel?

encyclo

1:19 pm on Jun 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

Within the

lang_main.php

file (at the top) you should see some variables defined like this:

$lang['ENCODING'] = 'ISO-8859-1';
$lang['DIRECTION'] = 'LTR';

The first is the charset (in this case, ISO-8859-1) and the second is the text direction: LTR is left-to-right, RTL is right-to-left (for Arabic or Hebrew, for example). These values are filled in automatically within

overall_header.tpl

- unless you have inadvertantly edited it. In that file you should see:

<html dir="{S_CONTENT_DIRECTION}">

and:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset={S_CONTENT_ENCODING}">

Also, I assume you have the appropriate fonts, etc. installed?

buksida

6:35 am on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

Okay, I have two lang_main.php files, one for each language pack. Now I have changed the English one to the Thai encoding and removed the meta from overall_header.php

It made no difference. I know this must be possible to have a board in two languages but I have no idea how to do it! The Thai script works fine in posts but titles are just gibberish.

I just want one sub category in Thai.

Also can't find where the fonts would go in the phpBB folder structure.

buksida

7:07 am on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

Got it!

Finally tweaked it, fonts not necessary, was just a case of messing with the page encoding.