Translation

Overview

Minetest can use the gettext library to translate in-game text. To enable internationalization support, the game must be built with the -DENABLE_GETTEXT=1 option to cmake.

Language detection

Minetest detects the current language by inspecting the LANG environment variable. This is not a problem on Unix-based systems (such as GNU/Linux) since the system already defines this variable at login. On Windows platforms, you must define the variable manually^[how?]

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Available translations

The available translations are found in source form in the po/ directory. The cmake detects them, and they are built as part of the build process.

Contributing a new translation

To create a new translation, one must create a directory named after the language code, creating a copy of the po/minetest.pot file as po/LANG/minetest.po, and translating the original english text into your language; then one can either use the util/updatepo.sh script or let make take care of it on the next build.