How To Edit Translate.csv File in Magento

In this tutorial, We’ll guide you How to edit Translate.csv File in Magento.

you should know that there is a way to edit translation CSVs using one file – translate.csv. In order to do that, you just need to set locale via Magento admin area, then create translate.csv in app/design/frontend/locale/languagecode_COUNTRYCODE and put your translated strings inside this translate.csv file.

Here are some tips and tricks:

1. All strings should start and end with double quotes and should be separated with comma (,), not a semicolon or any other sign

2. It can be very handy to alternate the default theme strings with the help of app/design/frontend/<package>/<theme>/locale/en_US/translate.csv file

For example:

3. All the lines are case-sensitive and the first message must be copied exactly as it appears in the default en_US version.

For example, if in en_US locale the string looks like that

But in your translate.csv you would try

It simply wouldn’t work, so be careful with that.

4. Some strings can contain %1$s %s %d etc., and if you want to have the correct strings in your translations these entries should be also kept in the translated string

5. Your text editor should be able to save an edited CSV file in UTF-8 encoding (), especially when you translate using different alphabets. If you have your translations in Excel, you need to convert your file to UTF-8 (find more info on how to convert Excel to CSV with UTF-8 encoding StackOverflow ).

6. If you need to have double quotes in your string they need to be escaped by using two double quotes

7. There are some strings that can be presented in a few extensions simultaneously. For example, in “Add To Cart” strings can be found in both Mage_Catalog.csv and Mage_Checkout.csv. What if you would like to translate/change them differently? Normal way would be to edit .phtml files manually, but with translate.csv you can solve this issue more elegantly – just put your extension name as a prefix and you will be able to translate them separately.

8. Last but not least – remember to refresh all caches after any changes of your translate.csv file!