The FreeCAD website and the Trigo theme support multiple languages using Hugo’s multilingual mode.

Enable multi-language

To make the Hugo project multi-language, configure the supported languages:

defaultContentLanguage: en
languages:
  en:
    label: English
    weight: 1
  fr:
    label: Français
    weight: 2
  ja:
    label: 日本語
    weight: 3

Manage content translations

Hugo supports multiple approaches to managing translations. The FreeCAD website currently uses the translation by content directory.

Translation by content directory

Each locale has its own content directory as configured by their contentDir parameter.

The current FreeCAD website configuration defined separate root content directories for each locale:

• /content
  • en
    • _index.md ← / (English homepage)
    • docs
      • _index.md ← /docs/ (English docs section)
  • fr
    • _index.md ← / (French homepage)
    • docs
      • _index.md ← /docs/ (French docs section)
  • ja
    • _index.md ← / (Japanese homepage)
    • docs
      • _index.md ← /docs/ (Japanese docs section)

This allows to use content mounts in the project configuration, where missing translated content uses the default language site as fallback (i.e. en for English).

Translation by filename

Hugo also supports managing translations by filename. With a file content/docs/_index.en.md in English, the file content/docs/_index.fr.md contains the French translation. This approach is currently not used for the FreeCAD website.

• /content
  • _index.en.md ← / (English homepage)
  • _index.fr.md ← / (French homepage)
  • _index.ja.md ← / (Japanese homepage)
  • docs
    • _index.en.md ← /docs/ (English docs section)
    • _index.fr.md ← /docs/ (French docs section)
    • _index.ja.md ← /docs/ (Japanese docs section)

Theme strings translations

To translate theme strings, i18n translation tables are used. YAML data files for each locale are stored in the i18n directory and define the string identifier and the translated value.

- id: title
  translation: "Titre"

Reference

• Hugo Multilingual Mode
• Hugo Multilingual Part 1: Content translation
• Hugo Multilingual Part 2: Strings localization