OpenEMR Internationalization Development Guide

For those interested in the actual software/scripts (pipeline) that created the language spreadsheet and then utilizes it for insertion in OpenEMR; they are kept in this directory (The README file is the best place to get an overview of the process):

• http://github.com/openemr/openemr/tree/master/contrib/util/language_translations

Here are the Previous sourceforge forums threads related to the internationalization project:

General Topic Threads

• Most Recent
• Third
• Second
• First

Specific Topic Threads

• Discussion on the new translation customization and logging module (releasing with version 4.0)
• Discussion on parametric translations and also discussion to further improve the backend (google docs spreadsheet) processing

The translation is done by the xl() custom function, which can be found at openemr/library/translation.inc.php. Its semantics are very simple.

xl(string)

Which with examples means:

xl('translate this')

By default the function will return the translation. First it uses the LANGUAGE constant defined to pick the translation. Second it goes for the translation, if none is found, then the same string entered is used and returned as is. Another example of use includes:

echo ("this and " . xl('translate this') . " that too");

Further details and rules on use can be found on the wiki here Development Policies - Internationalization

There are also wrappers to the xl() function that are used infrequently in specific situations. Please refer to openemr/library/translation.inc.php for more details.