archinstall/archinstall/locales/README.md

Nationalization

Archinstall supports multiple languages, which depend on translations coming from the community :)

Important Note

Before starting a new language translation be aware that a font for that language may not be available on the ISO.

Fonts that are using a different character set than Latin will not be displayed correctly. If those languages want to be selected, then a proper font has to be set manually in the console.

All available console fonts can be found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts and they can be set with setfont LatGrkCyr-8x16.

Also note that for example grub bootloader has ASCII limited range: For full disk encryption (LUKS2) or grub-shell, boot options edit: this means alphanumeric latin characters (one-char-per-keystroke).

Archinstall validates this by making sure your passwords are ASCII compatible. It is quite trivial through Login-manager and/or Desktop Environment to set other layouts or switching later-on.

For full at_keyboard support it is possible through ckbcomp See guide here And ckbcomp^AUR

By default bootloaders look for vconsole.conf keymap. Other bootloaders such as systemd-boot and limine have full keymap support.

Adding new languages

New languages can be added simply by creating a new folder with the proper language abbreviation (see list languages.json if unsure). Run the following command to create a new template for a language

mkdir -p <abbr>/LC_MESSAGES/ && touch <abbr>/LC_MESSAGES/base.po

After that run the script ./locales_generator.sh <lang_abbr> it will automatically populate the new base.po file with the strings that need to be translated into the new language. For example the base.po might contain something like the following now

#: lib/user_interaction.py:82
msgid "Do you really want to abort?"
msgstr ""

The msgid is the identifier of the string in the code as well as the default text to be displayed, meaning that if no translation is provided for a language then this is the text that is going to be shown.

Perform translations

Firstly run the script ./locales_generator.sh <lang_abbr> to update base.po to the latest.

To perform translations for a language, the file base.po can be edited manually, or the neat poedit can be used (https://poedit.net/). If editing the file manually, write the translation in the msgstr part

#: lib/user_interaction.py:82
msgid "Do you really want to abort?"
msgstr "Wollen sie wirklich abbrechen?"

After the translations have been written, run the script once more ./locales_generator.sh <lang_abbr> and it will auto-generate the base.mo file with the included translations.

After that you're all ready to go and enjoy Archinstall in the new language :)