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Translating EllesmereUI

EllesmereUI's options panel, unlock mode, and popups can be translated into any of the languages World of Warcraft supports. Translations are community-driven and live in plain Lua files inside the EllesmereUILocales addon (a LoadOnDemand sibling of the main addon). Missing translations fall back to English automatically, so a partial translation is completely fine and ships without breaking anything.

How it works

  • English is the key. There are no symbolic IDs: you translate L["Enable"] = "...", not L["OPTIONS_ENABLE"].
  • English clients never load the EllesmereUILocales addon at all. On a non-English client it loads at startup, and only the file whose language matches builds entries; every other file returns immediately.
  • Any key you leave out (or any string not yet wrapped) renders in English.

Add or improve a language

  1. Find your locale code (what GetLocale() returns): deDE German, frFR French, esES Spanish (EU), esMX Spanish (LatAm), itIT Italian, ptBR Portuguese (Brazil), ruRU Russian, koKR Korean, zhCN Chinese (Simplified), zhTW Chinese (Traditional).

  2. Create EllesmereUILocales/<code>.lua (copy EllesmereUILocales/deDE.lua as a starting point), beginning with:

    local L = EllesmereUI.RegisterLocale("frFR")   -- your code
if not L then return end

  3. Add a line in EllesmereUILocales/EllesmereUILocales.toc next to the other locales:

    frFR.lua

  4. Translate the right-hand side only. Keep the English key exactly as it is:

    L["Enable"] = "Activer"

  5. Open a pull request.

Rules

  • Encoding: UTF-8 without a BOM. Use real accented / CJK / Cyrillic characters (Größe, not Groesse). .gitattributes pins this; do not edit locale files with a tool that rewrites them as UTF-16.
  • Keep %1$s / %2$d placeholders. You may reorder them for grammar: L["Reset %1$s"] = "%1$s zurücksetzen". Never split a sentence into concatenated fragments.
  • Keep English on purpose with the true sentinel when a term shouldn't change: L["Mythic+"] = true.
  • Don't translate numbers, color codes, or proper nouns Blizzard already localizes (class/spec names come from the game directly).

Generating the full key list

You don't have to find every string by hand. In-game:

/reload
/euiloc on            -- start recording (before opening the options)
... open every options page, cog popup, and tooltip ...
/euiloc dump frFR     -- writes a paste-ready L["..."] = "" block
/euiloc off

The block is saved to EllesmereUIDB._localeDump in WTF\Account\<account>\SavedVariables\EllesmereUI.lua (after a /reload or logout). Paste it into your locale file and fill in the translations.

EllesmereUILocales/_keys.txt is a committed, static list of the literal keys (regenerated by .tools/extract-locale-keys.sh; CI keeps it current). It is a quick offline reference, but the in-game /euiloc harvester above is the complete source of truth because it also captures strings passed to L() as variables.