Changing the language¶

Material for MkDocs supports internationalization (i18n) and provides translations for template variables and labels in 60+ languages. Additionally, the site search can be configured to use a language-specific stemmer, if available.

Configuration¶

Site language¶

1.12.0 en

You can set the site language in mkdocs.yml with:

theme:
  language: en # (1)!

1. HTML5 only allows to set a single language per document, which is why Material for MkDocs only supports setting a canonical language for the entire project, i.e. one per mkdocs.yml.

   The easiest way to build a multi-language documentation is to create one project in a subfolder per language, and then use the language selector to interlink those projects.

The following languages are supported:

Note that some languages will produce unreadable anchor links due to the way the default slug function works. Consider using a Unicode-aware slug function.

Site language selector¶

7.0.0

If your documentation is available in multiple languages, a language selector pointing to those languages can be added to the header. Alternate languages can be defined via mkdocs.yml.

extra:
  alternate:
    - name: English
      link: /en/ # (1)!
      lang: en
    - name: Deutsch
      link: /de/
      lang: de

1. Note that this must be an absolute link. If it includes a domain part, it's used as defined. Otherwise the domain part of the site_url as set in mkdocs.yml is prepended to the link.

The following properties are available for each alternate language:

name

This value of this property is used inside the language selector as the name of the language and must be set to a non-empty string.

link

This property must be set to an absolute link, which might also point to another domain or subdomain not necessarily generated with MkDocs.

lang

This property must contain an ISO 639-1 language code and is used for the hreflang attribute of the link, improving discoverability via search engines.

Stay on page¶

insiders-4.47.0

Insiders improves the user experience when switching between languages, e.g., if language en and de contain a page with the same path name, the user will stay on the current page:

docs.example.com/en/     -> docs.example.com/de/
docs.example.com/en/foo/ -> docs.example.com/de/foo/
docs.example.com/en/bar/ -> docs.example.com/de/bar/

docs.example.com/en/     -> docs.example.com/de/
docs.example.com/en/foo/ -> docs.example.com/de/
docs.example.com/en/bar/ -> docs.example.com/de/

No configuration is necessary. We're working hard on improving multi-language support in 2024, including making switching between languages even more seamless in the future.

Directionality¶

2.5.0

While many languages are read ltr (left-to-right), Material for MkDocs also supports rtl (right-to-left) directionality which is deduced from the selected language, but can also be set with:

theme:
  direction: ltr

Click on a tile to change the directionality:

Customization¶

Custom translations¶

If you want to customize some of the translations for a language, just follow the guide on theme extension and create a new partial in the overrides folder. Then, import the translations of the language as a fallback and only adjust the ones you want to override:

<!-- Import translations for language and fallback -->
{% import "partials/languages/de.html" as language %}
{% import "partials/languages/en.html" as fallback %} <!-- (1)! -->

<!-- Define custom translations -->
{% macro override(key) %}{{ {
  "source.file.date.created": "Erstellt am", <!-- (2)! -->
  "source.file.date.updated": "Aktualisiert am"
}[key] }}{% endmacro %}

<!-- Re-export translations -->
{% macro t(key) %}{{
  override(key) or language.t(key) or fallback.t(key)
}}{% endmacro %}

theme:
  language: custom