Internationalization and localization support

In Siren Investigate, only a select subset of elements can be translated. To report any problems with this feature or to request further information, contact Siren.

Internationalization is enabled in both the core application and the core plugins. You can use one of the supplied pre-translated languages or supply your own translations. If you have additional custom plugins, you must also enable internationalization support for them.

Pre-translated files for the following languages ship with Siren Platform. These files are in the translations folder, and are available out-of-the-box.

Table 1. Supported languages and locales
Language	Locale name
English	en
Spanish	es
French	fr
German	de
Japanese	ja
Korean	ko
Chinese	zh
Arabic	ar
Thai	th
Polish	pl
Ukrainian	uk
Portuguese	pt
Romanian	ro
Hindi	hi
Punjabi (India, Gurmukhi)	pa

Localizing to a pre-translated language

To localize Siren Investigate to a pre-translated language, complete the following steps:

In the translations folder, locate the pre-translated language file.
Open the investigate.yml file and set the i18n.locale value <locale_name> to the language you want to use. If the i18n.locale key isn’t already in the investigate.yml file, add the key and save the file.
Restart the application to see the translated strings applied in the interface.

Modifying pre-translated strings

You can modify any of the translated strings to better suit your dialect or industry’s terminology.

To modify any of the pre-translated terms in the language files, complete the following steps:

In the <locale_name>.json file, replace the text strings in the messages object with your modified version of text strings.
Make sure that the i18n.locale value is set to <locale_name> in the investigate.yml file. If the i18n.locale key isn’t already in the investigate.yml file, add the key and save the file.
Restart the application to see your modified terms applied in the interface.

Before updating Siren Investigate, backup any modifications you make to pre-translated files to avoid losing your modifications.
Don’t change the keys or any of the parameters inside the curly brackets.

If you want to add new keys, contact Siren at https://support.siren.io/ to make a suggestion.

Applying a custom translation

If you want to use a language that’s not one of the pre-translated languages, you can generate a translation file and replace the values with your own translations.

To apply custom translations, complete the following steps:

In the siren-investigate folder, open a Terminal window and execute the following command:
- Linux and MacOS:
  node/bin/node scripts/i18n_extract.js --output-dir translations
- Windows:
  node\node scripts\i18n_extract.js --output-dir translations
  This command generates a file called en.json in the siren-investigate/translations folder. The en.json file contains a messages object, which at a minimum contains the following code in English, the default language:
```
"messages": {
  "kbn.dashboard.options.darkThemeCheckbox": "Use dark theme",
  "kbn.dashboard.options.hideSearchBarCheckbox": "Hide search/filter bar"
}
```
Rename the file to <locale_name>.json.
Open the investigate.yml file and make sure that the i18n.locale value is set to <locale_name>. If the i18n.locale key isn’t already in the investigate.yml file, add the key and save the file.
In the <locale_name>.json file, replace the text strings in the messages object with your translated text strings.

Before updating Siren Investigate, backup your custom locale file to avoid losing your customizations.
Don’t change the keys or any of the parameters inside the curly brackets.

To translate a string that can be either singular or plural, refer to Elastic’s i18n guidelines for pluralization.

Localizing custom plugins

Before you begin, refer to the Kibana I18n Tools guidelines and follow the instructions to add the keys and default messages.

After you add the keys and default messages, complete the following steps:

To initialize the i18n provider, add the following statement to the root JavaScript file of the plugin (app.js or index.js):

import ui/i18n;
At the root of your plugin, create a folder called translations and a file called .i18nrc.json. Both the folder and the file can remain empty for now.
Install the plugin in siren-investigate as usual.
When the installation is complete, go to the siren-investigate folder, open a Terminal window, and execute the following command:
- Linux and MacOS:
  node/bin/node scripts/i18n_extract --path siren_plugins/<your_plugin_name> --output-dir siren_plugins/<your_plugin_name>/translations
- Windows:
  node\node scripts\i18n_extract --path siren_plugins\<your_plugin_name> --output-dir siren_plugins\<your_plugin_name>\translations
If no errors are found, the command creates an en.json file in the new translations folder of your plugin. This file contains all the keys added to the plugin to support translations.
Replace the values in the messages object in all of the files and save the file as <locale_name>.json.

Open the .i18nrc.json file in the plugin and add the following object:

{
  "translations": [
    "translations/your_locale_name.json"
  ]
}

Restart the server.
Start the application to see the translated strings in the user interface.

To avoid problems starting the application, ensure the following:

The translations folder in the core application and in every plugin contains a <locale_name>.json file.
Both the .i18nrc.json file and the <locale_name>.json file exist.
The translations array in the .i18nrc.json file contains the string translations/<locale_name>.json. If the string isn’t there, add it.