theme.locale or theme.language?

[Guts]

Hello,

I'm trying to solve an issue on the RSS Plugin (see Guts/mkdocs-rss-plugin#212, Guts/mkdocs-rss-plugin#206 and Guts/mkdocs-rss-plugin#205) related to the site language.

I'm a bit confused on the Mkdocs setting to use:

• the Mkdocs theme.locale: https://www.mkdocs.org/user-guide/configuration/#locale
• the Material for Mkdocs theme.language: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/changing-the-language/#site-language

My question is mainly the following: what's the rationale behind using a custom language option instead of using the upstream Mkdocs locale? is the language setting defining the locale? I need to understand before moving on.

cc @alexvoss

[alexvoss]

That is a good question. If the answer turns out to be "this is historical" then perhaps aligning with MkDocs would be good and we could get Material mentioned as one of the themes that supports i18n? Just my 2p.

[squidfunk]

Answered in #4253 (comment)

[squidfunk]

To expand on this: we might switch to locale, maybe in one of the next major releases. However, we should also re-evaluate whether we can somehow use a better translation mechanism that we currently have, but it is definitely not a priority, since it works reasonably well and makes contributing translations ridiculously simple. This is also why we're already at 65 translations.

If somebody wants to work on this, we can consider a PR. Note that we have translations in the frontend (mainly search).

[Guts]

Thank you for your quick answer and the explanation.

I've pushed a custom behavior for Material theme: https://github.com/Guts/mkdocs-rss-plugin/blob/560d7067527a4ca0bd96fad94f41fc0c3876ae5c/mkdocs_rss_plugin/util.py#L626-L637