Translations

Every user-visible string in a Mendix app — page titles, widget captions, button labels, validation messages, enum captions, menu items — is a text with one translation per language. MDL works on them in bulk: one file per language.

The loop

# 1. export — an untranslated string comes back with an EMPTY target
mxcli -p app.mpr -c "describe translations for de_DE" > de_DE.mdl

# 2. fill in the right-hand sides, by hand or by handing the file to an LLM

# 3. write them back
mxcli exec de_DE.mdl -p app.mpr

DESCRIBE emits the CREATE form, so the export format and the import format are the same file and the empty targets are the prompt. A whole app is typically a few hundred distinct source strings, so one file per language stays practical.

Statements

DESCRIBE TRANSLATIONS [IN <Module> | WITHOUT MARKETPLACE] FOR <lang>;

CREATE            TRANSLATIONS [IN <Module> | WITHOUT MARKETPLACE] FOR <lang> ( '<source>' AS '<target>', ... );
CREATE OR MODIFY  TRANSLATIONS [IN <Module> | WITHOUT MARKETPLACE] FOR <lang> ( ... );
CREATE OR REPLACE TRANSLATIONS [IN <Module> | WITHOUT MARKETPLACE] FOR <lang> ( ... );

Entries use AS, not a colon: a translation maps a user-provided name to another name.

Verb	Meaning
`CREATE`	the “add a language” form — refuses if that language already has translations in scope
`CREATE OR MODIFY`	merge; a source string the file does not name keeps what it has
`CREATE OR REPLACE`	the file is authoritative — a translation whose source it does not name is removed, and the run says which

IN <Module> scopes both directions, and under OR REPLACE it bounds the deletion — without it, per-module files would wipe each other on every run.

Marketplace modules

Without IN, a run reaches the whole project, Marketplace modules included — and with them the Atlas page templates and building blocks. On a stock app, 'Cancel' AS 'Annuleren' set 50 translations in 38 documents, 35 of them in Marketplace modules. A module update replaces a Marketplace module’s contents, so those translations are lost at the next update and show up as unexpected diffs until then. The run warns, with a count per module:

Warning: 47 of these translation change(s) landed in 35 document(s) of Marketplace
modules (Atlas_Web_Content 13, FeedbackModule 2, WorkflowCommons 20; 14 of the documents are page templates or building blocks).

WITHOUT MARKETPLACE keeps the run in your own modules, and names the file’s entries that also occur in the modules it skipped. Under OR REPLACE it also keeps the deletion out of them. DESCRIBE accepts it too, and emits it, so the described file round-trips:

mdl 1;
describe translations without marketplace for nl_NL;
create or modify translations without marketplace for nl_NL ( 'Cancel' as 'Annuleren' );

Naming a Marketplace module with IN <Module> is taken as meaning it, and does not warn. The default stays the whole project: what an existing script writes does not change underneath it.

A translation is only built if its language is enabled

This is the one thing worth knowing before translating anything.

A translation written for a language the project has not enabled is stored in the model, passes mx check, is kept by Studio Pro — and is discarded at build time. Measured with mxbuild --target=deploy: the string appears nowhere under deployment/, and no translations_<code>.properties is produced at all.

So it is possible to translate four hundred strings into German, see every run report success, and get no German in the app. CREATE TRANSLATIONS warns when the language is not enabled. Enable it first — see Project Settings.

A stock app invites the mistake: it enables one language while its marketplace modules ship translations in nine, so “other languages already have translations here” is true and misleading.

LIST LANGUAGES lists languages that have translations, which is a different list — a stock app reports nine while one is enabled. The enabled list is in DESCRIBE SETTINGS.

Drift: a source string that was edited

The dictionary is keyed on the source string, so Save is translated once for every place it occurs. The flip side is that editing a source after the file was written stops it matching.

A key that matches nothing is reported, not skipped — and where the translation identifies the moved source unambiguously, the run names the fix:

Warning: 1 source string(s) in the file matched nothing in the project.

  "Thingz" as "Grejer"
      No text has "Thingz" as its source. A text now reads "Things" and carries
      the sv_SE "Grejer" — the source was probably edited. Change the file to:
        "Things" as "Grejer"

Notes

The source language is the project’s default: the left-hand column is what DESCRIBE shows for it. Translating into the source language is refused — it would overwrite the strings everything else is keyed on.
A rewrite keeps other languages. Re-executing a page or microflow does not drop the translations MDL cannot express, so you need not re-import a language after editing a document.
To remove a language’s translations, make an empty file authoritative: CREATE OR REPLACE TRANSLATIONS FOR de_DE ( );

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