Override GLPI locales

GLPI uses the gettext tool to manage its translations. You can override the default. This is the preferred method rather than editing the original po files and risk losing your changes when updating GLPI.

To do so, you need to create a file named filename.po in the files/_locales/core/ directory. You can also create overrides for plugins with the same method in files/_locales/pluginkey/ directory where pluginkey matches the plugin folder name.

Depending on your GLPI configuration, the _locales directory can be located elsewhere (if you provided a local_define.php file with a GLPI_LOCAL_I18N_DIR constant). It's possible to have multiple files, to manage several languages for example.

The file must be a valid gettext file. You can use Poedit to create it.

# Override PO file
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2019-04-13 10:43+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2019-04-13 10:43+0200\n"
"Last-Translator: Automatically generated\n"
"Language-Team: none\n"
"Language: en_GB\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

msgid "Login"
msgstr "Login from local gettext"

msgid is the source string, msgstr is the translation. You can find the correct source sentences to use in the locales/glpi.pot file.

Next you need to compile your .po file into a .mo file readable by GLPI. To do so, you can use the following command:

$ cd files/_locales/core/
$ msgfmt -o filename.mo filename.po

Finally, GLPI uses a cache system to avoid loading MO files at each request. You need to clear the cache to see your changes. To do so, in Debug mode, go to "Setup > General", "Performance" tab and click on "Reset" button on the "Translation cache" section. If you have command-line access, you may also clear this cache using the glpi:cache:clear CLI command. If you clear the cache with the CLI command, make sure you run the command as the web server user.