Working With Translations

April 14, 2026

Pure Comments ships with English (en) as German (de) the only built-in languages. The translation system is designed so that community contributors can add new languages without any changes to the core codebase.

The German translation was done by AI, so will probably need some work. If you're a native German speaker, please feel free to submit a PR to improve the translation.

How it works

All user-facing strings are stored in language files under lang/. On each request, Pure Comments loads the file matching the configured language and looks up strings by dot-notation key — for example dashboard.title or comments.author_badge. If a key is missing from the active language file, it falls back to the English value automatically.

The embed widget strings (the comment form, load button, and so on) are included in the API response so they are translated in the visitor-facing UI as well as the admin.

Adding a language

Create a new file in lang/ named with the IETF language tag for your language, e.g. lang/fr.php for French or lang/pt-BR.php for Brazilian Portuguese.

The file must return an array with the same structure as lang/en.php. The simplest starting point is to copy en.php and translate each value:

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

return [
    'login' => [
        'title'   => 'Connexion aux commentaires',
        'heading' => 'Administration des commentaires',
        // ...
    ],
    // ...
];

You do not need to include every key. Any key you omit will fall back to the English string.

Once the file is saved, the language selector will appear automatically in Settings — it is hidden when only en.php exists.

Selecting a language

Go to Settings and choose your language from the Admin language dropdown. Save. The admin UI and all API responses will switch to the selected language immediately.

String sections

lang/en.php is divided into these sections:

Per-site embed string overrides

If you want to customise the wording of the comment widget on your site, without changing the language file, you can override individual strings using window.PureComments.strings before the embed script loads:

<script>
window.PureComments = {
    strings: {
        title:        'Discussion',
        load_btn:     'Show comments',
        author_badge: 'Author',
        form_heading: 'Join the discussion',
        submit_btn:   'Post comment',
    }
};
</script>
<script src="https://comments.example.com/public/embed.js" ...></script>

Any keys you omit use the server-translated strings from your language file. The full list of overridable keys matches the embed section of the language file.

Contributing a translation

If you have translated Pure Comments into another language, contributions are welcome. Open a pull request on the Pure Comments repository adding your lang/{code}.php file.

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