Languages

A banner is a legal notice, and a notice nobody can read is not one. CookieWave ships professionally seeded translations for its launch languages, so adding one to a site is a choice from a list rather than a translation project — you only write anything if you want wording of your own.

Adding a language

Add it to the site, and every string the banner shows arrives already translated: the notice, the preference centre, the category names and their descriptions, the US opt-out dialog, and the TCF banner's own chrome. Then edit whatever you want to say differently. Your edits are yours — a later improvement to the shipped wording never overwrites them.

One language is the site's primary one. It is what a visitor gets when nothing better applies, so it is the one to fill in first.

Which language a visitor gets

Two ways to decide it, chosen per site in the translations editor:

Setting	What it reads
The page's lang attribute (default)	<html lang="…"> on the page the banner loads into
The visitor's browser setting	The language their browser asks sites for

The default is the page's own attribute, because it says what the content is written in. A German visitor reading your English page is reading it in English, and a German banner over English text tends to read as a mistranslation rather than a courtesy. Choose the browser setting when your site serves one language but your audience does not.

Either way, the detected language is used only if you publish a translation for it. Otherwise the visitor gets your primary language — a half-translated banner is worse than one confidently in the wrong language. A regional code matches its base, so a page marked en-GB gets your en translation, and an exact pt-BR translation is preferred over pt when you publish both.

Check the lang attribute is right

On the default setting, a page whose <html> tag says lang="en" on every page of a Czech site will show every visitor the English banner. It is the single most common cause of "the banner is in the wrong language", and it is one attribute.

Right-to-left languages

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and the other right-to-left languages lay the banner out right to left automatically — buttons, toggles, the lot. It follows from the language itself, not from a setting: choosing one is the whole instruction. This is not cosmetic. In a mirrored layout, accept and reject end up in the opposite corners from where a reader expects them.

What you cannot change

IAB TCF purpose and feature texts. On a TCF site, the descriptions of the eleven purposes and the special features are IAB Europe's, shown verbatim in the visitor's language. A CMP that rephrases them fails certification. The translations editor shows them for reference and marks them locked; everything around them — the banner title, the introduction, the buttons, the tab labels — is yours.

The "Powered by CookieWave" line. Our attribution, in our wording.

What the tabs mean

The translations editor has a tab per framework, and only the ones your site runs are open:

• GDPR — the standard category banner and preference centre.
• US opt-out — the notice and dialog Californian and other US-state visitors see. Available on the US and combined templates.
• IAB TCF — the TCF banner's chrome. Available when TCF is enabled.

A tab a site cannot use is locked with a note saying which setting would open it, rather than hidden — the wording you would write there is the wording you would need if you switched, and knowing it exists is part of deciding.