Localization in IPFS Companion

September 17, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Table of contents

IPFS Companion supports running in specific locales, with translations provided by the community via Transifex.

Running Chrome with a specific locale

Chrome comes with locales out of the box, so it is enough to set the proper env:

LANGUAGE=pl chromium --user-data-dir=`mktemp -d`

Further resources

Running Firefox with a specific locale

Unless you've installed a locale-specific build, Firefox will have English only. If your build already has the locale you are interested in, skip step #2.

  1. Set intl.locale.requested in about:config or the command line via:

    web-ext run --pref intl.locale.requested=pl

  2. Install your language pack from https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/language-tools/

  3. Reload the browser extension; it should detect your new locale

Further resources

Contributing translations

Internationalization in IPFS Companion (and all IPFS-related projects) depends on the contributions of the community. You can give back by contributing translations in your language(s)! Go to the IPFS Companion Transifex page, send a request to join a specific language team, and start translating. You can also download raw files from Transifex, translate them in your own editor/tool, and then upload them back there, but many people prefer using the simple and friendly Transifex GUI.

If your language is not present in add-on/_locales yet, but is supported by mainstream browsers, please create a new issue requesting it.

Translation synchronization

Translations sync automatically from Transifex weekly via .github/workflows/tx-pull.yml:

  • Uses --mode onlytranslated to pull only translated strings
  • Empty strings fallback to English via browser's i18n API at runtime
  • Creates PR for review

Note: Edit translations only in Transifex. GitHub changes will be overwritten.