Spoken languages

Communication within a team always works better when people can use their spoken language. Cucumber supports over 40 spoken languages and the number is steadily growing. This is Norwegian:

# language: no
Egenskap: Summering
  For å unngå at firmaet går konkurs
  Må regnskapsførerere bruke en regnemaskin for å legge sammen tall

  Scenario: to tall
    Gitt at jeg har tastet inn 5
    Og at jeg har tastet inn 7
    Når jeg summerer
    Så skal resultatet være 12

  Scenario: tre tall
    Gitt at jeg har tastet inn 5
    Og at jeg har tastet inn 7
    Og at jeg har tastet inn 1
    Når jeg summerer
    Så skal resultatet være 13

A # language: header on the first line of a feature file tells Cucumber what spoken language to use – for example # language: fr for French. If you omit this header, Cucumber will default to English (en).

Listing the available languages

cucumber --i18n help

Listing the keywords of a particular language

For example Russian:

cucumber --i18n ru

Adding a new language

It’s easy!

1. Make a fork of Gherkin and clone it
2. Add your language’s keywords to i18n.yml
3. Commit and push your changes – then send a pull request at GitHub.

That’s it! When a new release of gherkin is made you can specify in a # language: xx header in your feature files.

See Gherkin’s README about building gherkin if you don’t have time to wait for the next release.

Adding examples for a new language

The examples live in the Cucumber codebase.

Just copy the examples/i18n/en example to a new directory with the same name as the language you added. Then translate everything in there. When you’re done you should be able to run rake i18n from the examples/i18n directory. If you want this code back into the official source you have to do those changes in your own cloned Git repo and send a pull request.