Translate Elxis CMS 4.x

[webgift]

Elxis CMS 4.x has been translated into 12 different languages so far. Those are: Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, English, Farsi, French, Croatian, Italian, Serbian, Russian, Serbian Latin and Turkish. I personally would like to thank you all of the existing translators who help Elxis made known to their mother languages. Now, if you are interested to translate Elxis CMS 4.x to your language here is a small guide on how you can do that. Below are the steps:

Before you start
- Download a free code editor like PSPad. Download.
- Verify that you save the files with UTF-8 encoding without BOM.

Steps
- Download the Elxis CMS from https://www.elxis.org website. Current version: Elxis CMS 4.1 Poseidon released on 2013.06.17
- Unzip elxis_4.1_poseidon_rev1452 file and go to the folder /language/
- Choose your source language for translation.
- Copy the source language folder and rename it according to shortest ISO 639 code (ISO 639-1 OR 639-2).

How can i find out my language shortest ISO 639 code?
It's easy!
- Open the file /includes/libraries/elxis/language/langdb.php
You will find out an array named langdb with all languages. You can search for your language like: German, Finnish, Icelandic etc

EXAMPLE: We want to translate Elxis CMS 4.x in to German. Here is how we can find the shortest code of German language:
'de' => array('LANGUAGE' => 'de', 'REGION' => 'DE', 'DIR' => 'ltr', 'NAME' => 'Deutsch', 'NAME_ENG' => 'German'),

So we are going to rename the copied folder under /language/ to de. From now on we will use de language prefix for all of the files like: de.com_content.php, de.com_cpanel.php etc.
For example you could see an existing translated language file as the base of English language.
EXAMPLE:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
en.com_content.php file:
$_lang['ARTICLES_ON_CAT'] = "Articles on category %s";
$_lang['GENERAL'] = 'General';

de.com_content.php file:
$_lang['ARTICLES_ON_CAT'] = "Artikel auf Kategorie %s";
$_lang['GENERAL'] = 'Allgemeine';
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Note
All of the php language files that are placed to the language directory are related to the core language of Elxis. Each third party extension which is placed on Elxis Download Center (http://elxis.net/) may have additional language file. You could choose to translate them too.

You could zip all of the translated file into a de.zip file and send them to Elxis Team info[at]elxis[dot]org.
If you still face any issue regarding that please inform us here.
Thank you.

[datahell]

Very nice guide Stavros.
BTW Juergen Roehm works on the German translation.

[webgift]

Thank you John. I wrote in order to redirect all of the future translators here.

[wbread]

New version 4.2 includes new phrases that have not been translated and added in the appropriate language, that would not look for them in the English version of the entire file, you can put them separately, then I'll just add them.