Translate a Drupal Site into Simplified Chinese

What a Drupal .po file holds

Drupal imports and exports its interface translation as gettext .po files through the Interface Translation module. They hold the strings of core, modules and theme: buttons, status messages, form labels. Each entry pairs a source msgid with a translated msgstr.

These strings carry Drupal's placeholders, which must survive untouched:

• @name: escaped value;
• %name: escaped and emphasised value;
• :url: a URL placed in an attribute.

Chinese word order often differs, so placeholders move: Welcome, %name may become %name，欢迎您. That is expected; what matters is that the placeholder is present and unchanged.

Node content, menus and much of the configuration are not in these files. This page covers the interface exported as .po only.

Simplified Chinese in a Drupal interface

Chinese is written in simplified hanzi, left to right, with no spaces between words, and uses full-width punctuation: ， 。 ：. A label such as Username: becomes 用户名：.

Text is two to three times shorter in characters, but each character is wider, so on-screen space changes little. Anything trimmed by character count behaves differently, though: a teaser cut at 200 characters in a View will show far more content in Chinese. Review trim settings in your Views and display modes.

A Latin font has no Chinese glyphs. If your theme loads a web font limited to Latin script, browsers will fall back to another font, often a poor match. Add a family covering Simplified Chinese to the font stack.

Drupal treats Simplified Chinese (zh-hans) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant, Taiwan, Hong Kong) as separate languages. Manuce does too: Traditional is a separate order.

Plurals: one form only

Chinese has a single CLDR plural category, other: “1 条评论” and “5 条评论” share one construction, number plus measure word. A Chinese .po header normally reads Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;.

The trap lies in Drupal strings like 1 comment / @count comments. In a two-form source file, msgstr[0] often holds the singular with a literal “1”. Under the Chinese rule, Drupal always uses msgstr[0]: if it reads “1 条评论” rather than “@count 条评论”, the site will show “1” whatever the real count.

After translation, check plural entries: msgstr[0] must contain @count, and the header must match Chinese.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get back the same .po file, ready to import: indentation, entry order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM are preserved; only the values change.

• Each translated value is compared with the source, including @, %, : placeholders and HTML tags. If a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.
• Not translated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers and anything marked as non-translatable.
• The report lists translated strings and those left as they were, with the reason.

Manuce does not edit your theme, set fonts, fix the plural header or translate date formats: the Chinese convention 2025年3月14日 is configured in Drupal. Nor does it provide sworn or certified translation. Chinese carries a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word price, counted on the words in values, keys and tags excluded.

Preparing the export and checking after import

Before sending:

• export a file whose values actually hold the text to translate: an empty value stays empty;
• note strings to keep as they are, such as brand names or acronyms;
• request the free sample to judge register, for instance formal 您 versus informal 你.

After importing into zh-hans:

• check that hanzi render correctly across the theme;
• test a counter at one item and at several;
• read the report and handle strings left in the source language;
• reread messages containing %name to make sure the sentence reads naturally.

In practice

1. Export your Drupal site's interface as a .po file.
2. Upload it to Manuce, choose Simplified Chinese and review the quote and free sample.
3. Download the translated .po and its report.
4. Check the Plural-Forms header and plural entries, then import the file into zh-hans.
5. Review fonts, text trimming and any strings flagged in the report.