Setup

This page covers the practical setup before you translate anything. None of it is Fleetbase-specific — if you've contributed to any GitHub project before, skim and skip.

Prerequisites

You need:

• A GitHub account
• Git installed locally
• A text editor that handles YAML well (VS Code, Sublime, Vim, anything with syntax highlighting)
• (Optional) A way to run Fleetbase locally to preview your translation in context — see Self-hosting if you want to go this route

You don't need to run Fleetbase locally to contribute — you can translate the YAML files directly and rely on the maintainers to verify rendering during review. Running locally is faster feedback though, especially for languages that change UI sizing (long German words, RTL Arabic, dense CJK).

Step 1 — Identify the repository

Decide what you want to translate:

Full repo map with translation paths: Repositories →.

You can contribute to one repo at a time. Many translators start with the Console (most user-facing) and expand from there.

Step 2 — Fork and clone

On GitHub, click Fork on the repo you chose. Then clone your fork locally:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/<repo-name>.git
cd <repo-name>

Add the upstream remote so you can pull latest changes:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/fleetbase/<repo-name>.git
git fetch upstream

Step 3 — Find the translation files

Translation files live at one of two paths depending on the repo:

• Main fleetbase/fleetbase repository → console/translations/
• Every other extension → translations/ (at repo root)

Inside, you'll see one YAML file per locale:

translations/
├── en-us.yaml      # base language — never translate this directly
├── ar.yaml         # Arabic
├── de-de.yaml      # German
├── es-es.yaml      # Spanish (Spain)
├── es-mx.yaml      # Spanish (Mexico)
├── fr-fr.yaml      # French (France)
├── hi.yaml         # Hindi
├── ja-jp.yaml      # Japanese
├── ko-kr.yaml      # Korean
├── mn.yaml         # Mongolian
├── pt-br.yaml      # Portuguese (Brazil)
├── ru.yaml         # Russian
├── th.yaml         # Thai
├── vi.yaml         # Vietnamese
├── zh-cn.yaml      # Chinese (Simplified)
└── zh-hk.yaml      # Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong)

The exact list varies by repo. Some extensions have fewer locales than the Console. That's normal — start filling them in.

Step 4 — Create your locale file

Adding a new language

# from the translations/ directory
cp en-us.yaml es-mx.yaml      # example: Mexican Spanish

Use the standard BCP-47 language tag format: <language>-<region> (e.g. pt-br, es-mx, zh-cn). Lowercase, dash-separated.

For languages without strong regional variation, you can drop the region (e.g. ar, hi, vi, mn).

Updating an existing language

Open the existing locale file and en-us.yaml side-by-side. Use a diff tool to find keys present in en-us that are missing or stale in your locale:

# rough comparison — list keys only
yq 'paths | map(.) | join(".")' en-us.yaml > /tmp/en.keys
yq 'paths | map(.) | join(".")' es-mx.yaml > /tmp/es.keys
diff /tmp/en.keys /tmp/es.keys

(Requires yq — brew install yq or apt install yq. The exact command varies by yq version.)

Step 5 — Create a working branch

git checkout -b translations/es-mx-update
# or
git checkout -b translations/add-vietnamese

You're now ready to translate. Continue to File format → to learn the YAML conventions, placeholders, and rules of the road.