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Translations

FS PBX's interface is translated by its community, directly through GitHub. This page is for two audiences: people who'd like to help translate, and administrators who want to set the language a tenant sees.

Helping with translation​

There's no separate translation website -- everything lives in the FS PBX GitHub repository, in resources/lang/{locale}.json. Each file is a flat list of "English text": "Translated text" pairs. To contribute:

  1. Open the file for your language, e.g. resources/lang/es-es.json for Spanish. Every string the app knows how to translate is already listed there, one "English text": "..." pair per line -- new strings are added to every language file automatically the moment they're added in English, so you never have to go hunting for what's new or add a key yourself.
  2. An empty value ("") means nobody has translated that string yet -- it currently falls back to showing the English text. Search the file for ": "" to jump straight to what's left, and fill in your translation: 
    {
        "Save": "Guardar",
        "Extensions": "Extensiones"
    }
  3. If a source string contains a :placeholder (e.g. ":count items"), keep the same placeholder token in your translation, just move it to wherever it reads naturally in your language -- CI checks that the token survives translation, not its position.
  4. Open a pull request with your changes. A CI check validates the JSON and the placeholder tokens automatically; someone will review and merge it. You don't need to finish a whole language in one PR -- leaving the rest blank is completely normal, and each string you fill in is used as soon as it's merged.

If your language doesn't have a file yet, don't create one by hand -- open an issue or PR asking for it to be added to config/locales.php, which generates the file for you (fully populated, ready to fill in) the next time lang:sync runs.

A note on regional variants: some languages are listed more than once -- for example, Spanish, plus Spanish (Mexico) and Spanish (Latin America). Each one is a fully independent file with no connection to the others -- so if you're translating Spanish (Mexico), you're translating every string in resources/lang/es-mx.json yourself, not just the handful that differ from es-es.json. That's a deliberate choice: having one variant borrow from another was more confusing than helpful.

For administrators: switching the language​

Language is set per account, not per user -- everyone signed into the same account sees the same language. There are two levels:

System-wide default (all accounts)​

System Settings → General → Language sets the default language for the whole system. Every account that hasn't chosen its own language inherits it. This is the setting to change if you want to switch the language of the system as a whole. (Changing it needs the default-settings edit permission.)

Per-account (one account)​

Account Settings → General → Language overrides the system default for that one account. Leave it empty to inherit the system-wide default; pick a language to override it just for this account. Time Zone works the same way, right next to it.

Things worth knowing​

  • A language only appears in these dropdowns once it's translated enough to be usable. Partially-translated languages still exist and are being worked on, but aren't offered until they clear that bar -- so you won't accidentally switch into a half-finished interface.
  • A language change takes effect the next time affected users log in, or after a "Reload Settings" action -- the same as other settings, not mid-session.
  • Anything not yet translated for the chosen language falls back to English until the community finishes it.