It’s already been 7 years since they canceled that localization PR because the team was too small… following that logic, the most likely outcome is that they will never translate the admin panel because there’s really no reason for the team to grow that much. It’s an open-source project developed under a nonprofit model… I mean, just connect the dots and it becomes evident. Plus, the US market is already large enough for them to capture a sizeable % of the indie publishing market there regardless of how many people want the admin in German, or Japanese, or whatever. The project is already on v6 and the situation hasn’t changed… is it maybe time for all of us to simply accept this sad true?
WordPress still sucks in my opinion, but it’s still super widely used and well-known, and it’s also open source. So when I tell people about Ghost and they realize they can’t use it in their native language, it’s like… well, but WordPress lets me use it in my own language.. Like they’re already reluctant to change, and this just completely kills the idea.
It is quite regrettable that Ghost’s localization efforts fall short, even if plugins can bridge the gap. Frankly, better native localization would significantly boost its visibility and appeal. I find it deeply frustrating that in highly populated countries like China, there’s virtually no content or active discussion about Ghost on video and technology platforms.
I know some browsers have a translate function like Chrome and Firefox. It may not be the best solution but it is there.
What languages are you most interested in?
Technical users or those who know how to build websites can, of course, install translation plugins themselves.
However, when a site is truly aimed at the general public, the vast majority of ordinary users won’t bother with plugins — let alone on their phones.
Our website serves all kinds of people, including complete beginners. In particular, many young people today are absolute experts at mobile games and scrolling short videos, but the moment they’re asked to install a plugin or switch languages manually, they’ll simply give up.
Therefore, making translation seamless, out-of-the-box, and one-tap easy for everyone — rather than leaving the burden on users — is the only genuinely user-friendly approach for a mass-audience product.
I understand that. I am exploring an idea to make Ghost Localization on deployment for my environment. The ghost end product is managed by ghost themselves, but if I manage to pull off a way to translate ghost and keep it updated with the latest releases, I may offer this as a hosted solution. I can’t promise anything yet, but I am bilingual myself, and would like to help users that don’t want to fiddle with technicalities get what they need. I also want to make things affordable as well in good faith.
If you are interested, please indicate what language you’d be interested in and I will see if it’s viable for me to produce.
A good start would be providing a translation-ready version of the official themes. That’s a pretty easy lift – the translation code for themes is already in place, it’s just a question of strings not being wrapped.
(I’m kind of surprised other Ghost hosts aren’t already offering this, or maybe they are and I’ve overlooked it.) Built-in theme translation gets you a website that’s localized for the public already.
Ghost is not a monolith. Although we say “don’t fork the core”, and there is in fact a ‘core’ directory, most of what we think of as Ghost is really a collecting of interacting parts. So that somewhat simplifies the idea that you’d ship an enhanced version of the admin panel and the editor, since it’s a couple of separate apps anyway. If you did that, you’d need to carefully keep it sync’d up with the rest of Ghost. It’s not a “do it once and forget it”, unless you’re planning to lock versions on Ghost and not upgrade. (Which would mean that pretty soon you’d be explaining to users why the latest Ghost features aren’t available in your hosting package…)
A couple months ago, I’d have pointed you at this tutorial for translating Ember: https://lokalise.com/blog/emberjs-i18n-a-beginners-guide/#emberjs-i18n-with-ember-intl-example , for the main (non-settings) part of the dashboard and suggested that you look at how translation is handled in any of the front-end React apps… but looking at what’s going on in Github right now, I suspect that some substantial refactoring is going on, and it might save you a lot of effort to wait a bit for things to settle. I don’t know have any insider knowledge, but it looks like it might be a rewrite of the admin panel, and you might want to wait for it to be complete before you decide to tackle adding the i18n bits, for fear of working it all out on a system that might be about to get replaced. But like I said, that’s speculation. No insider knowledge here.
Aside: At one point, I thought I’d maybe contribute the i18n wrapping on the admin side after I got the theme translation overhaul wrapped up. (I did the work, it got merged, then it got reverted for good reasons, so I fixed the problem and did a bit of a rewrite, but it hasn’t gotten a review since. I’m not going to do the work to contribute i18n wrapping for admin without some indication that it would get reviewed and merged. And at the risk of sounding mercenary (it’s called freelancing), I’d be better off doing work someone will pay for anyway!
I was almost creating own forks for official themes once in a while (and actually already tried on one of them), then noticed your PR and happily stopped working on it. But now I see that it stuck since a very long time. Very sad to see that. Indeed, we first need to pass official themes language supports. I’m still hopeful to take attention to your PR.