shopping-cartmultilingualubercartlanguage-switching

How Can I Enable a Multi-Lingual Catalog Block on Drupal 6.32 + Ubercart 6.x-2.13


Description of Problem

No matter what I try, I cannot get my Ubercart Catalog Block to change languages when I use the Language Switcher. You can test this behaviour for yourself at:

holistichorsecare.com/zh/products/aromadog-arf-ritis-pain-relief-1oz

Regardless of the language context (English or Chinese, "en" or "zh-hant"), the shopping cart block on the left margin of the page, under all circumstances, displays this text:

Shopping cart

There are no products in your shopping cart.

0 Items Total: HK$ 0.00

Go ahead and give it a try. Load the page and click on English or Chinese as they appear in the page header. The shopping cart block does not change languages- and I'd like it to.

The Localization Files are Installed - I Think...

I've installed the following localization strings packages using the Administration front end and they appeared to be loaded correctly.

Checking out the Module Code

Looking into:

holistichorsecare.com/www/content/sites/all/modules/ubercart/uc_cart/translations/zh-hant

I see the following entry around line 1926:

msgid "There are no products in your shopping cart." msgstr "ä½ (妳)ç è³¼ç©è»è£¡æ²æä»»ä½åå."

(the garbled text is the multi-byte characters breaking up in my shell)

Looking into

holistichorsecare.com/www/content/sites/all/modules/ubercart/uc_cart/cart.module

I see the following call around line 706:

$output = '<p class="uc-cart-empty">'. t('There are no products in your shopping cart.') .'</p>';

So it appears that there is a call to t() to translate the string, but none is forthcoming from whatever system there is that serves up the alternatives.

Can someone please tell me where I need to go in the administration front end to enable localization/translation for the shopping cart block (ajax cart) in Ubercart?

I'm thinking I just missed a check box somewhere to turn on the translation, or have to tell Drupal/Ubercart that the strings in the Shopping Cart Block are to be translated, but I don't know where to go or how to do this.

P.S.: When I called i18n_get_lang() in troubleshooting code I got the right answer back (i.e. "en" or "zh-hant"), so the system knows what language context it is in.

Thank you.

UPDATE - SUCCESS!

I managed to get this working by importing zh-hant strings into the Built in Interface.

Here's how I did it:

1) I went to Site building » Blocks and confirmed that the Shopping Cart block Language setting was set to All Languages

2) I went to Site configuration » Languages » Configure » Language Negotiation and set the Language negotiation setting to Path prefix with language fallback

3) I went to Site building » Translate interface and selected the Import Tab

4) On the Import tab, I clicked on Choose File button and then selected ubercart-6.x-2.13.zh-hant.po, which holds a bunch of Chinese definitions. I got this definitions file from localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/zh-hant

5) I selected Built-in Interface and Existing strings are kept, only new ones are added

6) I then clicked on IMPORT

Verification

Once the import was complete, I clicked on the Overview tab to check the results:

Chinese, Traditional 4242/9881 (42.93%) 0/19 (0%) 0/16 (0%) 0/49 (0%) 0/37 (0%) 0/15 (0%) 1518/1518 (100%) 2/3 (66.67%)

Apparently, this import loaded 4242 definitions into the Built-in Interface section of the Drupal system. These strings are nowhere near the Store Administration area, which is a bit of a mystery to me, but hey - it worked.

Conclusion

Once I had completed the above steps, the Shopping Cart Block began to display correctly in Chinese or English depending on which language was selected with the Language Switcher.

Final Comment & A Question

On second thought, maybe this is not so counter-intuitive after all. After all, the BLOCK is part of the General Interface of the Drupal System, not specifically a part of the Checkout process.

Maybe I'm wrong about this...can anyone confirm or correct?

g.


Solution

  • The procedure you did is correct, code which calls t() will create a create a string (usually under the Built-in Interface group) and needs to be translated manually by searching for a string, or by importing a .po file which contains the necessary strings into that group.

    What makes the behaviour a little more bizarre if you're not familiar with it is that because t() only creates interface strings at call-time, you must view the content in the desired language first (even though it will be broken / no translations). This allows t() to create the string entries in the database, which allows you to subsequently translate them.

    I would recommend that you use a module such as l18n_update to keep your interface translations up to date automatically and import strings for any new changes made upstream.