Translations

Let's say you would like to translate the component to Spanish, these are the steps you should follow:

1. Copy the file /language/en-GB/en-GB.com_vik*****.ini into the folder /language/es-ES/
2. Rename the file as /language/es-ES/es-ES.com_vik*****.ini
3. Open the file es-ES.com_vik*****.ini and translate all the English definitions into Spanish
4. Save the changes.

The .INI files structure has changed since Joomla v1.6, now it reflects the INI Standards. Make sure to respect the .INI Syntax:

INSTRUCTION="Definition"

DEFINITION = double-quote Translation double-quote
One definition per row.

Some definitions of the .INI files contain some special characters that you should pay attention to leave unchanged. In the details, the "wildcards" and boolean strings, should not be changed.

If you find a definition containing something like "The Room %s is not available for %d nights", you should pay attention to leave unchanged the wildcards %s and %d because the system will respectively replace them with a string and with an integer number. The result of that definition will be something like "The Room Triple Deluxe is not available for 14 nights".

Other special words that should not be translated are boolean values like "true" or "false". Leave those wordings unchanged in your translation language file because the system will probably use them for rendering Javascript code.

Using a good text-editor for translating the .INI language files is a good practice. Most of them come with a syntax highlighter that will be helpful during the translation. Also, any syntax error will display the entire row as a different color.

We suggest Mac OS users to download and use the text-editors TextMate or Sublime Text. Linux users should pick their native text-editor because it comes with the .INI support by default on most Debian and RedHat distributions. gEdit is a good one for Linux. Windows users instead should use Notepad++ because the default text-editor Notepad doesn't even support the "new lines" characters used by the 90% of Linux-based web servers.

It is important to pay attention to the Encoding that your Text-Editor will apply to the .INI file when saving it. This may cause unexpected results on your site if the Encoding applied is wrong. Most of the times this will cause some special characters to be displayed as unreadable symbols or characters that are not of your language.
The suggested encodings are UTF-8 or UTF-8 BOM. Most languages and websites will work just fine with the UTF-8 encoding but some languages and web-servers require the UTF-8 BOM.

Components, as well as modules, are frequently updated and usually, new language definitions will be added to the translation files. If you are using an outdated translation of a previous version of the component, Joomla will more likely print the language definition which is something unreadable for the visitors of your website. This happens to all the language files except for English because that's the default language of any component.

In these cases the first thing you should do is compare the original English .INI translation file with your own translation file by using a good text-editor. The translation files should have the same number of rows and if they don't, it means that some definitions are missing. Usually you will find the missing translations at the bottom of the file because that's where the developers put the new language definitions.
By copying the new and missing language definitions from the English .INI file onto your .INI translation file, you will be able to translate the new wordings and update your translation. Upload the file back onto the server and your translation will be updated.

Translations containing double quotes must be "escaped" to avoid syntax errors and to break the parsing of the translations. For example, the language definition "Enable this setting before "pushing" the Rates." should be written in the .INI file as follows:

VIKDEFINITION="Enable this setting before \"pushing\" the Rates."

By placing a Back-Slash before each double-quote, you will escape the same character used to declare the language translation. Not using the escape method will break the loading of the .INI Translation file so part of the translations will not be used or displayed in your website.

All the .INI language files of the components are named en-GB.com_vik.....ini but translating the definitions of the component may not be sufficient when there are also some modules like a Search Form or anything else that you've published on a position of your Template.

The modules use .INI language files named en-GB.mod_vik......ini and they are always located in the /language directory of your website. For example, if you wanted to translated the module "Vik Search", the file you should copy, rename and translate is the following:
/language/en-GB/en-GB.mod_viksearch.ini
By creating a translated-copy of that file in your language folder, the module will be translated with all its wordings.

One of the most popular third party extensions for managing the translations of contents saved in the database is Falang. All the e4j extensions are compatible with this component, but the Content Elements definitions may not be updated.

In order to translate the names, the descriptions or any other field of the component into other languages, you need to upload onto Falang the Content Elements XML Files. These XML files are the instructions required by Falang for translating various contents.
Inside the full package of the extension you may find an archive called "Falang_ContentElements.zip". If this archive does not exist, then it should be downloaded from the third party extension developer's website. By unzipping this archive, you should copy via FTP all the XML files inside the unzipped folder, onto the following directory of your server:
/administrator/components/com_falang/contentelements/
Once those files will be uploaded, you will be able to translate the various contents saved in the database through Falang.

If you want to purchase a non-free version of Falang, you can use the following coupon code to get a 20% off.