Multilingual Extension

For translating CKAN’s web interface see Translating CKAN. In addition to user interface internationalization, a CKAN administrator can also enter translations into CKAN’s database for terms that may appear in the contents of datasets, groups or tags created by users. When a user is viewing the CKAN site, if the translation terms database contains a translation in the user’s language for the name or description of a dataset or resource, the name of a tag or group, etc. then the translated term will be shown to the user in place of the original.

Setup and Configuration

By default term translations are disabled. To enable them, you have to specify the multilingual plugins using the ckan.plugins setting in your CKAN configuration file, for example:

# List the names of CKAN extensions to activate.
ckan.plugins = multilingual_dataset multilingual_group multilingual_tag

Of course, you won’t see any terms getting translated until you load some term translations into the database. You can do this using the term_translation_update and term_translation_update_many actions of the CKAN API, See API guide for more details.

Loading Test Translations

If you want to quickly test the term translation feature without having to provide your own translations, you can load CKAN’s test translations into the database by running this command from your shell:

paster --plugin=ckan create-test-data translations

See Command Line Interface for more details.

Testing The Multilingual Extension

If you have a source installation of CKAN you can test the multilingual extension by running the tests located in ckanext/multilingual/tests. You must first install the packages needed for running CKAN tests into your virtual environment, and then run this command from your shell:

nosetests --ckan ckanext/multilingual/tests

See Testing CKAN for more information.