Translations

Evolve sites are multilingual by default. Three different things are translated, and each has its own mechanism.

Block content

Page content lives in blocks, and every translatable block field stores one value per locale. Editors switch the language in the block editor; the theme renders the active locale and falls back to the fallback locale for fields left empty (empty repeatable fields fall back too, since 2.5). Nothing to set up: a field marked translatable in its blueprint behaves this way. Regions add a layer on top, see Regions.

Model attributes

Records of modules (posts, members, events, projects, and the core's pages, navigation items, media and static strings) use astrotomic/laravel-translatable. The pattern is a base table plus an _i18n table that holds one row per locale:

Schema::create('acme_posts_i18n', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->unsignedBigInteger('post_id');
    $table->string('locale')->index();
    $table->string('title');
    $table->text('body')->nullable();
    $table->unique(['post_id', 'locale']);
});

The model carries the Translatable trait and names the translated attributes; the translation model is the base name with an I18n suffix:

use Astrotomic\Translatable\Translatable;

class Post extends Model
{
    use Translatable;

    public array $translatedAttributes = ['title', 'body'];
}

class PostI18n extends Model
{
    public $timestamps = false;
    protected $fillable = ['title', 'body'];
}

php artisan evolve:resource acme/blog post --translatable scaffolds exactly this: model, I18n model, both migrations, and a manager whose form shows one tab per active language. Reading $post->title returns the value for the current locale with the package's fallback rules; $post->translate('fr')->title reads a specific one. The active languages come from the Languages screen in the panel.

Static strings

Texts that belong to the theme rather than to a record (button labels, footer lines, the cookie banner) are static strings, edited in the panel under System > Static strings and read in Blade with __('key'). A string maintained only in the fallback locale resolves on every language (since 2.11), so a site can start with one language and translate later. Strings the theme introduces register themselves on first use.

Auto-translate

With APP_AUTO_TRANSLATE=true and a Google service account in GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, block fields show an auto-translate button that fills the current locale from the fallback locale through Google Cloud Translation. The result is a draft to review, not a translation to publish unread.