Adjusting Odoo's Japanese UI — How Translation Works Under the Hood

Used at an Odoo Open Talk on 14 June 2024. These slides are in Japanese. When Odoo's Japanese display will not behave, this deck explains what to touch and why, starting from how translation is built.

Note that Odoo core has since moved its translation platform from Transifex to Weblate. For the current procedure, see the separate Weblate deck.

What the deck covers

• What is translatable — field labels, menus, buttons, help text, reports, mail templates, the website, error and warning messages, and data fields defined as translatable
• How to spot it in the source — translate=True on a Python field definition, messages wrapped in the underscore function, and strings inside XML views and templates
• Differences by ownership — Odoo core, OCA modules, and your own custom modules each update their translation files by a different route
• Differences by engine — some strings are handled server-side and some on the front end, and website templates are where the constraints bite
• Where translation data is stored — held in a table up to 15.0, then as jsonb on the field itself from 16.0. Faster, but harder to adjust from the UI
• Applying project-specific wording — update the translation file normally for custom modules, and drop override translations into an i18n_extra folder for standard features
• A common problem — term collisions within one module, where words like Send or State need different translations by context but share one source string
• Useful OCA modules — template_content_swapper and report_qweb_field_converter

Related links

• Translating Odoo and OCA into Japanese with Weblate (current procedure)
• OCA/l10n-japan — Japanese localization modules