Translating Magento frontend

Question

Is there a way to easily just translate Magento default frontend through csv file, translating everything would be too time consuming and not really needed as it would make admin panel very confusing for me.

Same question was asked in Magento forums 4 years ago, but there was no easy way to do it at that time, but apparently Mangento team was contacted and they promised to look into it. So has anything changed since then?

Answer 1

Look into your /app/locale/en_US folder. There you have .csv's that do the translating. Everywhere you see $this->__('Checkout') or any other string, Magento hits up this folder for specific files that dictate what to replace with "Checkout" and every other string which echo's this way.

In the CSV files, the first field is the text to look for within $this->__(''), the second is what to replace it with. You'll also find different language translation files here.

Each CSV is named after the namespace it belongs to. Hence, Mage_Catalog.csv contains the translations for all the files that use the /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/ classes and /app/design/frontend/your_package/your_theme/catalog template files.

Here, you'll also find Mage_Adminhtml.csv, which handles most of the admin translations.