Translate a Drupal site into Japanese: the interface .po files

What a Drupal .po export actually contains

Drupal's Interface Translation module imports and exports the site interface as gettext .po files: button labels, form messages, strings from modules and the theme. Each entry pairs a source string (msgid) with its translation (msgstr). That file is what Manuce translates into Japanese, and what you import back into Drupal afterwards.

Three things in those strings need care:

• Placeholders: @name (escaped text), %name (escaped and emphasised), :url (a URL). They must come out intact, even when Japanese grammar moves them elsewhere in the sentence.
• HTML tags inside some strings, such as <a href=":url">: they wrap a word that will sit in a different position in Japanese.
• Plurals: entries with msgid_plural and numbered values msgstr[0], msgstr[1] and so on.

Editorial content (articles, basic pages, custom blocks) lives in the database, not in this file. The .po covers the interface only; page content has to be handled separately.

How Japanese changes your Drupal strings

Word order often flips. The verb comes last and modifiers come first. Submitted by @username on @date might become @usernameが@dateに投稿しました. Drupal's named placeholders allow this: what matters is that every one is present, in whatever order.

No spaces, full-width punctuation. Japanese does not separate words, and the comma and full stop become 、 and 。. A status message like The configuration options have been saved. ends with 。, not a Latin full stop. Spaces are usually not added around placeholders either.

Politeness register. Messages addressed to visitors use the polite です・ます form: ログインしてください。 rather than a blunt imperative. Button labels, by contrast, stay very short, often a bare noun: 保存 for Save, 削除 for Delete.

One plural form. Japanese has only the CLDR category other. The .po header should read nplurals=1; plural=0; and each plural entry has a single value, msgstr[0]. There is a Drupal-specific trap: the singular source is often written with a hard-coded 1 (1 comment). The single Japanese form must therefore use the placeholder, @count件のコメント, or every counter would read 1.

The % placeholders. Drupal wraps %name in an <em> tag, which most themes render in italics. Slanted kanji read poorly; that is a theme setting to plan for, not a translation issue.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get back the same .po file in the same format: indentation, entry order, quotation marks, comments (including the #: references to modules), line endings, encoding and BOM are all preserved. Only the values change.

Each translated value is compared with its source: same placeholders (@count, %title, :url), same tags. If a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so. A label left in English is better than a Japanese string that breaks a page or drops a link.

Not translated: the msgid keys, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers and anything marked as non-translatable. Pricing is based on the words in the values, excluding keys and tags; Japanese carries a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word rate.

What Manuce does not do:

• it does not touch your site: importing into Drupal, adding the language and configuring it remain your job;
• it does not translate content stored in the database, which is not in the .po;
• it does not change your theme (fonts, italics, line breaking);
• it does not provide certified or sworn translation, irrelevant for an interface but worth knowing if your legal notices require it.

Preparing the export and checking after import

Before uploading:

• Add Japanese (ja) as a site language, then export the interface .po file. Make sure it is UTF-8.
• Open the header and check the Plural-Forms line: for Japanese it should be nplurals=1; plural=0;. A header inherited from another language (nplurals=2) would throw counters off.
• List the brand names and product terms that must stay in Latin script, then see how they come out in the free sample: one paragraph of your file translated at the level you choose, before you pay.

After importing into Drupal:

• Read the report: any strings kept in the source language are listed with the reason.
• Check that your theme's font stack includes a Japanese font; otherwise browsers will fall back to whatever system font they find.
• Look at line breaks in menus and buttons: with no spaces, browsers break between characters, which can split a katakana word such as ダッシュボード across two lines.
• Set Drupal's date formats yourself, as they are not translated: Japanese usage looks like 2024年5月3日.
• Walk through the pages dense with placeholders and plurals: login, password reset, form validation errors, pagination, comment counters.

For a public-facing interface aimed at Japanese customers, the Professional level is the sensible choice; Essential is enough for an internal back office.

In practice

1. Export the interface .po file from Drupal's Interface Translation module, in UTF-8.
2. Check the Plural-Forms header (nplurals=1; plural=0;) and upload the file to Manuce for an instant quote and a free sample.
3. Choose a level, pay, and download the same file translated, with its report.
4. Import the .po back into Drupal for Japanese and check fonts, line breaks, date formats and counters.