Languages¶

Each user sees the admin in their own language. Vector’s UI ships in English and sixteen more: German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Polish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Your application’s labels — resources, fields, enum options, actions, widgets, dashboards, settings — are translated with it.

Note

English is the base language everywhere. Every other catalog, and the demo’s label translations, are machine translations. Review them before relying on them — the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic ones especially, with a native speaker — and override any message you want worded differently (below).

Switching language¶

The language menu in the app bar (the translate icon) lists the languages on offer, each in its own name with its name in your current language beneath (Deutsch — German), so a script you cannot read is still recognizable. The list keeps one order whatever language you are in, so it never reshuffles on a switch: Latin-script names alphabetically, then Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. The settings page lists them the same way. Choosing one switches the whole admin at once — menus, labels, dates and numbers — and is remembered as your preference, on every device you sign in from. Hebrew and Arabic turn the layout right to left.

Until you choose, the admin is in the default language the administrator set; your browser’s language plays no part.

Every list of languages — the menu, the switches, the default’s options — follows Kinetis\Vector\Translation\Locales::SHIPPED.

Which languages are offered¶

An administrator decides, under Settings → Languages: one switch per language, all on at first, and the Default language — English unless changed — for every user who has not chosen one. The default must be one of the languages switched on, so at least one always is; the page refuses to save otherwise. The language menu follows as soon as the settings are saved.

A language switched off cannot be chosen, not even through the API. A user who had chosen it sees the admin in the default language from their next page on — at once, for the administrator who saves the change — and if it is switched on again, their choice returns.

Translating your labels¶

Every label you declare is looked up as a translation key, in the language being shown; a label without a translation is shown as you wrote it. Put one PHP file per language in a directory and name it in VECTOR_TRANSLATIONS_DIR (relative to the project root):

<?php
// translations/de.php
return [
    'Products' => 'Produkte',
    'Price' => 'Preis',
    'Draft' => 'Entwurf',
    'Reprice the selected products?' => 'Die ausgewählten Produkte neu bepreisen?',
];

Keys may be the English text, as above, or keys of your own ('shop.products') that an en.php turns into English. Nested arrays are flattened with dots. A regional tag falls back to its language (pt-BR reads pt.php). The files are read once, when the worker starts.

Vector binds a MessagesTranslator over its own translations/ (the labels of its built-in settings groups, machine-translated like the UI’s catalogs) and your VECTOR_TRANSLATIONS_DIR. To use your framework’s own translator instead, bind Kinetis\Vector\Translation\TranslatorInterface in your application.

Translation happens at response time — the descriptor, settings groups, dashboards and widget results — so the compiled registry stays in your labels’ own words. The MCP schema resource is translated for the user’s preference too. Record values are data and are never translated.

Validation messages, the framework’s and Vector’s own, are in English.

In the UI¶

The layer ships English (the base and the fallback, key by key) and the catalogs above, with the codes pt (European) and pt-BR, and zh-Hans for Simplified Chinese. The descriptor’s i18n names the user’s language and the languages on offer. The language menu lists them in the server’s order, Locales::SHIPPED’s, naming each in itself with its name in the current language beneath (languageName(), from Intl.DisplayNames), and switching calls useVectorLocale().choose(code), which stores the user’s locale preference and reloads the descriptor.

Before the descriptor loads, the UI starts in the hosted shell’s language, else the one this browser last used, else app.config vector.locale. Applying a language switches the catalog, Vuetify’s component strings, the Intl formatting of dates, numbers and money, and <html lang dir>. Hebrew and Arabic render right to left, and the layer’s own components use logical spacing (ms-/me-) so they mirror.

Changing the UI’s messages¶

Add or override the UI’s messages per locale and area:

export default defineAppConfig({
    vector: {
        messages: {
            de: {
                common: { save: 'Sichern' },
                list: { filter: { add: 'Filter hinzufügen' } },
            },
        },
    },
})

A runtime extension does the same without a build:

window.Vector.defineMessages('de', { common: { save: 'Sichern' } })

The English catalog in the layer’s app/i18n/en/ names every key; every shipped locale mirrors it, and a key a locale lacks falls back to English. Messages use {name} placeholders and are never rendered as HTML. A message that depends on a count lists its language’s own forms, separated by |, in CLDR order — zero, one, two, few, many, other — only the ones that language has for whole numbers (pluralCategories()): two in English and German (1 change | {count} changes), three in Hebrew (one, two, other) and in Russian (one, few, many), one in Japanese, six in Arabic. pluralRule() picks the form by the browser’s Intl.PluralRules. A two-form override you add is read the English way in any language.