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Internationalization

Version 57.40 by Eleni Cojocariu on 2025/11/14 12:10
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XWiki can be set-up to support one or various languages.

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If you wish to help out improve translations, check our translation platform.

Preferences

Setting up languages is done in the Administration (link on the top left of every page).

The "Default Language" in Administration sets the default language for your entire wiki. It controls which language new Pages will use when they are first created.

Information

To make use of this feature for Languages with encodings that are not ISO-8859-1, you will need to adjust the encoding for your XWiki setup as documented in the Encodings page of the Administrators Guide.

AdminLanguages.png

Switch to another language

By default the language displayed will be the one coming from the browser. However, on every page you can choose to switch between the different language translations that exist for that page. To do so click on the language name in the top right corner of the screen as shown in the following screenshots. Note that you can also force a language by suffixing a URL with language=<2-letter language code>. In addition you can configure your wiki to always use a specific language or force a single language to be used.

LanguageEN.png <-English    Deutsch-> LanguageDE.png

Information

Once you click on a language, you're forcing it and thus all pages which have translations in that language will display these translations by default when you navigate to them.

Page translations

The title and content of a wiki Page can be translated in multiple locales. For this, your administrator needs to configure your wiki to be multilingual and set the list of supported locales. Once this is done, XWiki will try to show you the title and content of the Page translation that matches the current user interface locale. If the Page has not been translated yet then XWiki will show you the title and content from the original version (Default Page Content) of the Page. Every Page has a Default Page Content, created in a specific language, called "Original Locale". This is the Page where the content was first created. When you are viewing the Default Page Content, the “Locale” field in the "Information" tab actually represents the Default Locale of the page. To be able to navigate to the Default Page Content under the "Original Locale" make sure your administrator has configured the locale you chose to be supported.
You can check the "Information" tab at the bottom of the Page to see the "Locale" of the current Page, its "Original Locale", as well as the list of existing and missing Page "Translations". You can use the links to access the available Page translations or to create the missing ones.

Edit a translation

When editing a plain wiki page the editor will load:

  • the page translation that corresponds to the current language, if it exists and multilingual is on
  • otherwise, the original page

When editing a structured page the editor will load the original page because the structured data (objects) are shared by all page translations.

From Wiki and WYSIWYG editors, you can switch to a different page translation or create a missing translation. From these editors, you are also able to change the default (original) Page language.

In the "Page Translations" Panel you can see the current language you are performing translations in and the alternative languages you may translate your page to. These are the languages your administrator have previously set up in "Administration".

Information

Note that all translations of one page share the same set of XWiki objects. As a result it is impossible to have different objects (and page tags, which are objects too) in different translations for now, but it is planed in next versions.

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