Greetings,

I am Phil King, Product Owner for the Angry Llama scrum team, which is actively completing our work to provide translations for cPanel & WHM. Ken Power summarized the localization project in a recent post.

I am pleased to announce that we have merged the 29 available translations into cPanel & WHM version 11.46. This work represents a great many changes to how we phrase things in x3 and Paper Lantern and standardizes on a more modern locale system.


Our legacy LANG system, while providing the potential for a translatable product, was truthfully too English-centric. Our earlier interfaces contained sentences that the system chopped up into several partial phrases based on English syntax. Now, we prefer to use phrases that form complete thoughts, which are considerably easier to translate. This also provides opportunities, not available in the legacy system, for translators whose languages read from right-to-left.

The legacy LANG database has been kept untouched and in place. Similarly, the software that looks up the translated value of a phrase is, for the most part, unchanged. In this phase of the project, we have removed usage of the legacy LANG system from the cPanel & WHM code base.

What does removal of our use of the legacy LANG system mean for you?

You need to examine your systems for use of the old style lookup keys. Sometimes these keys are called short tags. The following are examples of these old style keys:

  • ChangePassword
  • email_page_description_singular

A full list of old style lookup keys can be found in /usr/local/cpanel/lang and /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/lang.

If you have provided your own custom translations, such as Slovak, using the old style lookup keys, they will no longer be used by x3 or Paper Lantern. Your users will only see English text. In order to function, you will need to convert your translations to the Locale Maketext format. You can translate phrases using the Edit a Locale feature in WHM.

If you have implemented old style lookup keys in one of the following ways, the correct text should continue to display:

  • Customizations of x3 or Paper Lantern
  • Custom applications that use old style lookup keys
  • Third-party themes that use old style lookup keys

A caveat with these implementations is if your users switch their language a newer locale, such as Korean. In this situation, they would see a mixture of English, from old style lookup keys, and the new language.

Visit https://rosetta.cpanel.net:2083/ to preview the translated x3 and Paper Lantern themes. We have created 29 different users that represent the available translations. Due to the nature of the demo mode, these accounts cannot be switched between x3 and Paper Lantern. To allow you to see both localized, we have created two accounts for each language. To login you can simply click the username that corresponds to the language (if you have issues with logging in, the password for the accounts is set to โ€œlocaledemoโ€).

Use the following accounts to see x3 localization:

Use the following accounts to see Paper Lantern localization:

Please send all feedback about the new localizations to localization@cpanel.net. I encourage you to give us as much detail as you can; this will help us find and address any issues you might have before cPanel & WHM 11.46 ships to EDGE.

Thank you for your time,

Phil King