It's not possible to translate into English.

[BrunoMine]

In my mods the code is written in portuguese language.
The minetest.get_translator() method seems to ignore the english translation. (all other languages work normally).

Minetest version: 0.5.0-dev-00ceec9
OS: Ubuntu 17.04

In my mods the code is written in portuguese language.

Even if it is a bug that English translations are ignored you should consider coding in English for interoperability and then translate to Portuguese.

[narrnika]

I apologize for returning to the old topic, but ...
I recently faced a similar situation and realized that the problem is not only what language to use in the code.
With this approach, any change in the English version (typo correction, for example) changes the key, and it becomes necessary to make these changes to all translations, otherwise the string will be considered untranslated.
It would be a good option to use a short key in the lua code (as the name of a variable); full English text place in *.en.tr file, as other languages.

[mnh48]

I'm following this issue to see what will be done about it

There is a potential for end user of our language who don't learn / forgotten / weak in using English to want to make Minetest mod, which would result in them writing the mod code in our language, who would then ask other people (potentially non-Minetest / non-technical user) who do know English (but don't know how to code) to just help translate it from our language to English afterwards so that people who don't know our language can also use the mod

not everyone know English after all to be fully capable of writing all of their mods in English
plus, forcing someone to learn and write in a whole different language by force is a form of linguistic discrimination
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[rubenwardy]

This also prevents monolingual translation, where you use an id rather than the source language as the key

Here's a test case: monotrans.zip

[Zughy]

Related: luanti-org/contentdb#622

[j-r]

Am I missing something or is this really fixed by just adding `po/en/luanti.po'?

IMO it would make sense to also add en_UK and en_US (with the corresponding option in dlg_settings.lua).

[sfan5]

Am I missing something or is this really fixed by just adding `po/en/luanti.po'?

It's not.
Taking the case where you use IDs: If you translate MYKEY1 to Some text for English, users with a different language will not see the English translation, but just MYKEY1.

[j-r]

Am I missing something or is this really fixed by just adding `po/en/luanti.po'?

It's not. Taking the case where you use IDs: If you translate MYKEY1 to Some text for English, users with a different language will not see the English translation, but just MYKEY1.

Obviously, but while a fallback locale might be quite useful it seems to be a separate issue orthogonal to the OP's request. Which is about being able to provide an English translation for their work that currently isn't accessible to en locale users at all (and only those, all other supported locales work just fine). And my question was whether adding the po would enable OP to provide an English translation. AFAICT it does, but I may be missing something.