FreshPorts can now be translated. Over the past few days, nearly all of the website’s own text has been prepared for translation using gettext. That covers:
- the header, sidebar and footer;
- the account pages, and the signup and password emails;
- the commit, port and category pages;
- search and the port lists;
- the watch-list pages;
- the FAQ and the other information pages.
This is not in production yet. www.freshports.org is still English only. You can preview the translations on test.freshports.org, and they’ll come to the main site after more testing and translation.
Some things stay in English, because they come from the FreeBSD ports tree:
- port descriptions;
- commit messages;
- ports framework terms such as
BROKENorUSES.
The legal and privacy pages also stay in English, so the English version remains the authoritative one.
What you’ll see once it’s live
- Your language, automatically: FreshPorts picks a language from your browser’s settings.
- Your choice remembered: you can switch with the language picker at the bottom of every page, and FreshPorts remembers your choice.
- Local dates: day and month names follow your language too, so “Saturday, 3 Oct 2026” becomes 2026年10月3日星期六 in Chinese.
Two translations so far
Two translations have already arrived, thanks to their volunteers:
- Simplified Chinese, by ykla
- Turkish, by Yusuf Yaman (nxjoseph)
To preview them, visit test.freshports.org and pick 简体中文 or Türkçe in the footer. The test site can change or be unavailable without notice.
Volunteers wanted
There are about 1,180 strings to translate, and both translations above still need help with the newest ones. If you’d like to see FreshPorts in your language, or help finish Chinese or Turkish, please send a pull request.
You don’t need to know PHP: each translation is a single .po file, and editors such as Poedit make it straightforward. Everything you need to get started is at:
https://github.com/FreshPorts/freshports/tree/main/locale
Questions, or spotted a mistranslation? Open an issue at https://github.com/FreshPorts/freshports/issues.
Thank you to everyone who has helped so far.
