In the olden days, in order to create a custom language pack, people had to manually copy over all the required text files, look up the text to be translated in the UI to understand the context, and zip all the files back.
Atlassian has since provided a more streamlined way of creating translations, allowing you to create translations directly from the JIRA UI.
For this recipe, we need to have the InProduct translation for the JIRA add-on installed. You can download it from the following link and install it with the Universal Plugin Manager:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.translations.jira.inproduct
Proceed with the following steps to translate the JIRA UI elements:
- Select the Switch off Translation option from the user profile menu.
- Hover your mouse over the UI element that you want to translate and click on the Translate this button. Note that not all elements can be translated. If you do not see a Translate this button, it means the text cannot be translated.
- Enter the translation in the Translated message text area.
- Click on Save to create the translation. The following screenshot shows a translation add-on page:
You can also search for text strings directly from the translation panel and translate the text. Not all text can be translated in JIRA; if you hover your mouse pointer over an item that does not turn green, it means it cannot be translated. Generally, most of the UI elements are translatable.
The translations you create will be for the language you have set in your own user profile. Once you have created your translations, users using the same language for their profile will see the updated translations.
By default, the InProduct translation for the JIRA add-on lets everyone create translations. This can be a very useful way to crowd source the translation rather than relying on an individual, such as the administrator, alone. However, you can also restrict access to translations by group:
- Navigate to Administration | Issues | Access Management.
- Select the groups that should have access.
- Click on Apply to restrict access.
You can also review the translations you have and package them as a language pack. You can then deploy this to your other JIRA instances as follows:
- Navigate to Administration | Issues | Translations.
- Click on the Download As Language Pack link to generate your language pack's
.jarfile, as shown in the following screenshot:
Another good use of a language pack is to customize terminologies used in JIRA, rather than go for translation. For example, if you are using JIRA as a general purpose ticketing system, you might want to change all occurrences of the word "issue" to "ticket", to avoid confusion. In this case, you can create a language pack that simply changes that one word, as shown in the previous screenshot, where we have changed terms such as Issue Linking to Ticket Linking.