Uploading translations to Joomla

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This page will explain the process of uploading finished translations to a Joomla website through the Joomfish+ component.

  • Note - the page appears long only because the process is divided into small and easy steps, accompanied by images showing everything new that is said. You'll be able to quickly go through the steps and make sense of the whole thing. :)


Before you start, you will need to download and install the program Notepad++. It is free and will serve you well during the process. Unfortunately, it is available only for Windows. If you are using another platform, you will need a text editor that fully supports UTF-8 encoding. If you have no idea which editor supports which encoding, this wiki page may help you.

After you've installed the program, open it up and go to Settings=>Preferences. There you have to select that UTF-8 without BOM encoding will be applied to opened ANSI files.

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Now to get to business! :)

First, you will receive an account username and password for the site you want to translate. Logging in with this account will allow you to go to a special menu item that is otherwise hidden.

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  • Note: Some sites (like thevenusproject.com) may require a few attempts to log in.
  • It is also worth to note that the account details should be handled with discretion since they give access to ALL translations for that language.


Go to that menu and you'll be taken to the Joomfish+ component, which is the area where you upload the translations. The first thing to mention is that the drop-down arrow on the top left should always be set on English. That means that you will be translating from English.

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Now, in order to upload your translations, you have to select the language that you are translating into and the element of the site that you want to translate. This is done through the two drop-down arrows on the right side. The language should already be set to your own language, so let's choose the site element. We have a bunch of options, but we need to know only two of them. The first one is Contents. It allows you to translate the actual content inside a given article.

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When you've chosen a language and content element, a whole bunch of articles will appear. These are all the articles that are published on the site. Click directly on the title of the first one for which you have completed the translation in your language. When you enter it, the first thing you see is that you have option to translate the article's Title and the Alias. What you have to do is to translate the article Title, but just copy/paste the Alias.

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After you've inserted the Title and Alias, start scrolling down. Just below is the content of the article. Scroll down until you reach the end of the article's content, where you will see a blue text editor. That is the place where you insert your translation. But where to get this translation from? The next paragraph explains how you get the translated article contents, to then put in the editor.

You will have received a bunch of .html files for the articles that you have fully translated in Pootle. These .html files normally open with your internet browser. But for our purposes we will need to open them with Notepad++ (or an equivalent UTF-8 supporting text editor for another operating system), which will allow us to see the contents of the file. (We assume that you have already selected the Apply UTF-8 without BOM setting that we mentioned in the beginning of this tutorial.) Simply drag and drop the .html file to Notepad++ and it will open. When you open it, it will show you the source text with the HTML tags. Please check if the encoding is UTF-8 without BOM. If it is not UTF-8, some special characters from your language may not display right, in which case you can try the option "Convert to UTF-8 without BOM". If there is still a problem with the characters, please contact us.

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If everything looks good, simply select all the content (Ctrl+A) and copy it, and then go to the blue editor in the Joomfish+ area of the site. Now, this editor has two modes. The default one is for normal text. But when you click on the top left button, which says "Source", you go to the HTML mode and can then paste the HTML contents that you just copied.

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If you click on the Source button again, it will show you how it will appear on the front-end ('front-end' refers to the public area of the site, i.e. what the public will see), without the HTML tags. And with this we are done with the inserting of the translation.


The next step is a very important one and it should become like a habit. After you've inserted the translation, you need to make a backup of the HTML contents. You will receive a shared folder in Google docs for this purpose. Simply create a Google document for every article translation that you have inserted, and paste in it the source HTML.

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Of course, every time you modify the translation, you will need to update the backup. The simplest way is to Select All in the blue editor (Ctrl+A), then copy (Ctrl+C), then Select All in the Google document for that article and then paste (Ctrl+V). That will replace the old backup with the newest version.

Having these backups means that our work will not be lost in the event of something happening with the site. Technical problems can always occur, so making this little extra effort for keeping an always updated backup is our "insurance".


After you have put in the translation and made the backup, scroll down the page until you reach the bottom. There you will see two columns. The left says "Original" and the right says "Translation". On the right one, change the Author to your language coord name. For our example in Turkish, we choose Turkish LangCoord. After that choose the Content language.

Uploading to Joomla tutorial8.jpg Uploading to Joomla tutorial9.jpg

After that, scroll to the top of the page, and on the right side click on the "Published" box.

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Then simply click on the Save button above. If you don't want to save, click on Cancel. In Joomla, if you want to exit something (without saving the changes you made), you have to click on the Cancel button. Don't click on the Back button of your browser. If you want to exit WITH saving the changes you made, click Save. Note that the Cancel button will not preserve your work, so that you can come back to it later - on the opposite, your work will be lost.

  • Important Note - if you stay inside an article for a lot of time, working on the translation, you may get logged out of the site without knowing it. And if that happens, when you click on Save, the site will ask you to login or something similar, and it will not save your work. So it is advised, if you are going to spend a lot of time on the translation, to work in Notepad++ or in the Google document for that article.

And that is it - click on Save and your translated article is published! If you want to translate a menu item, select Menus from the Content Elements drop-down arrow.

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Translating a menu item is much simpler. When you go inside one of them, translate the Title, copy the Alias, and after that click on the "Published" box. Then Save. That's it!

You should be aware that some changes you make may take time to show on the front-end of the site. In some cases it may take up to 24 hours. But if you've saved it, it will show up.

That's the nuts and bolts of how to put up your precious, made with love translations. If you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to contact lizardman on the forum.

Now enjoy seeing your efforts coming to fruition!