Your first translation
Join a translation project, find your language, and translate your first strings. It takes about fifteen minutes.
This guide gets you from zero to your first translated strings. You do it all in your browser.
Home Assistant's interface text is split over four Lokalise projects. Each link below opens the project and lets you join it:
- Frontend: the Home Assistant interface itself. Start here if you are not sure.
- Backend: text that comes from integrations, like setup steps, entity names, and error messages.
- iOS: the companion app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
- Android: the companion app for Android phones, tablets, and Wear OS.
Lokalise asks you to create a free account. After that, join the project and pick your language. You can join more projects and languages later. New to the editor? Lokalise explains it in translate and collaborate.
Open your language and filter on untranslated strings. If your language is already complete, that is great news, and there is still plenty to do: read through existing translations and improve the ones that feel off. Fresh eyes catch a lot.
Translate a handful of strings to start. Short ones are a good warm up.
Not sure what a string means? Look at its key. A key like component::wled::config::step::user::description tells you it is the description of the first setup step of the WLED integration. Still unsure? Leave a comment on the string instead of guessing.
Some strings contain parts between curly brackets, like {count}, or between square brackets. Do not translate those names: Home Assistant fills them in while it runs. The exception is a plural or a choice, like {count, plural, one {# device} other {# devices}}: keep its keywords, and translate the text inside the inner brackets. Placeholders and references explains how they work.
Translations are pulled from Lokalise when Home Assistant is built. There is no separate approval step and no pull request: what you save in Lokalise is what a build picks up. When you see it depends on the project:
- Backend: every build of Home Assistant Core downloads these, so your strings are in the next nightly build, the next beta, and the next release.
- Frontend: the frontend is built and released on its own, and downloads translations at that moment. A nightly frontend build is made every day, and the nightly builds of Home Assistant use it. A beta or release of Home Assistant ships a specific frontend release, so your strings reach it with the first frontend release that is built after you saved them.
How translations work has the details.
The companion apps work a little differently. Android pulls translations at build time too, while the iOS app gets them through a daily pull request in its repository.
- Read the translation rules. They are short.
- Check if there are guidelines for your language, like whether to address people formally or informally.
- Join another project. The backend project has a lot of strings and often needs help.