Translate the interface

The app is natively written in English and we did our best to provide machine generated translations for some of the most spoken languages in the world.

OpenKnowledge's interface is available in many languages. The language selection can be found at Settings → Preferences → Language.

This changes the interface, not the languages used to check your writing. Desktop spelling settings are separate.

Language is an app appearance setting and can be set directly in the config configuration reference. That table is the source of truth, so this page doesn't repeat it.

How you can help

• Fix errors, improve existing translations
• Request support for another language

Run OpenKnowledge in the language you're checking

Set the language in the UI setting or set it by hand in ~/.ok/global.yml (~/.ok-beta/global.yml in OpenKnowledge Beta):

appearance:
  language: bn # <-- set to the language you are testing

Use the tag exactly as it appears in the configuration reference (zh-Hans, pt-BR, and so on). The editor picks the change up without a restart.

Reading the interface in your own language is the best review there is, and the one nobody here can do for you.

On the desktop app, the OK_LANG environment variable additionally overrides the native menus for a single run, which is the quickest way to check menu translations without touching config. The rest of the window follows appearance.language, so set both if you want everything in one language at once.

Report a translation correction

Choose Feature request in the issue chooser. In What problem are you trying to solve?, include:

• The language you are checking and whether you speak it natively.
• The screen or menu where the text appears, with a screenshot when useful.
• The current text.

Put your suggested wording and why it is clearer in Proposed solution.

If you found the entry in packages/app/src/locales/<locale>/messages.po, include its msgid so we can locate it. The glossary lists the words we use consistently; mention any glossary wording that needs correcting too.

What is and isn't translated

• The application strings ARE translated.
• **User Generated content is NEVER translated: **Document bodies, titles, file and folder names, frontmatter values and tags stay exactly as you wrote them, in every language.
• The CLI's commands, flags and machine-readable output REMAIN English ONLY on purpose, so scripts keep working whatever the machine's locale is.
• This documentation site is English only for now.
• The embedded Excalidraw board follows the interface language wherever Excalidraw offers a translation for it. The board's toolbar, menus and settings come from Excalidraw itself rather than from these catalogs, so translating them here is not possible. Hindi, Bengali and Urdu get an English board, because Excalidraw does not offer a translation for them that it considers complete enough to ship; every other supported language gets a translated one.

A language that isn't on the list

Choose Feature request in the issue chooser, name the language and describe who would benefit.