Translations

On a multilingual site, the Translations tab in the right panel lists the page you have open in each of your site’s languages. It only appears on a page whose collection is translated.

• Original marks the page in your default language, which the others translate.
• This page marks the one you’re looking at. Click any other language to open it.
• Original changed since marks a translation whose original was saved after it, so it may need updating. Zeku goes by when each file was last saved, so right after a fresh clone, when every file has the same time, nothing is marked.
• Start translation appears beside a missing language. It copies the original, frontmatter and all, to the same path in that language’s folder and opens it, so you can translate it in place.

Images beside the original are copied beside the translation, so its links stay as they are and you can swap in a translated image. Other paths relative to the page, like an image in a shared folder, are rewritten so they still reach the same files from the copy’s folder. The copy leaves out the fields that give the original its address. aliases and your redirect field go, so the original’s old URLs keep pointing at the original. A slug changes with the language: on a Starlight site, or when the slug starts with its language, like en/intro, the copy gets the same slug in the new language, like fr/intro, which is how Starlight pairs a page with its translations. On other sites the copy’s slug is left out, so it doesn’t take the original’s URL.

New pages

When every page of a collection sits in a language folder, New asks which language a new page is in, starting on your default language, and creates it in that language’s folder, so it gets an address on your site. It does the same when each page is a folder of its own, like en/first-post/index.mdx.

How Zeku finds your languages

Astro and Starlight both keep a translation at the same path, in a folder named for its language, so fr/guides/intro.md is the French version of guides/intro.md. Zeku reads your languages from astro.config: the locales and defaultLocale options of Starlight, or Astro’s own i18n option. When your config keeps the list in a variable or imports it from a file of its own, Zeku follows it there.

Without either, Zeku treats a collection as translated when all of its pages sit in two or more folders named like language codes, such as en and fr.