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
Add new language sets

Run OpenKnowledge in the language you're checking

Set the language in the UI setting or set it by hand in ~/.ok/global.yml:

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.

Make the change

Translations live in inkeep/open-knowledge, one gettext catalog per language:

packages/app/src/locales/<locale>/messages.po

Edit the msgstr values. Leave every msgid alone — that is the English source string, and the key the app uses to look the translation up. An empty msgstr means "untranslated" and falls back to English, so don't blank one out to flag a problem; open an issue instead.
Follow the glossary. GLOSSARY.md, in the same folder, pins one form per language for the words that recur everywhere (document, folder, branch, and so on) and lists what is never translated at all: the product name, format names such as Markdown and YAML, and placeholders like {count}. If a glossary entry is wrong for your language, change that row and sweep every message that uses it in the same pull request. A catalog holding two words for one concept is worse than either word on its own.
Regenerate the compiled catalogs. The app loads a compiled messages.json beside each .po, and CI fails when the two disagree:
```
cd packages/app && pnpm run i18n
```
Commit both files.
Open a pull request. Say which language you read and whether you speak it natively.

CONTRIBUTING.md covers the rest: toolchain, pnpm run check, and the Contributor License Agreement.

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

Open an issue before starting work on one. Then follow the instructions above to provide a complete language set. Don't forget to add the language to the list of available UI languages so other users can select your translation set from within the desktop application!