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 · Default: 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 · Default: none

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

Default: none · Required – 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

Default: none · Required – This property must be set to an absolute link, which might also point to another domain or subdomain not necessarily generated with MkDocs.

lang

Default: none · Required – 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.

Directionality¶

2.5.0 · Default: automatically set

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