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Two Romanian Language Packs for Magento. One of Them Is Five Years Old.

August 7, 2026 - Alexandru-Manuel Carabus

If you searched "magento romanian language pack" you probably installed the bratucornel version, last updated June 2021. An actively maintained alternative sits at magento-l10n, synced from Crowdin, refreshed last month. Why to switch, and how to switch in three commands.

Two stacks of paper sheets side by side on a slate workbench. The left stack is taller and slightly aged with a curled corner and dust at the base. The right stack is shorter, crisp, with a soft teal accent along the top edge and a small muted orange sticker at its corner.

If you are installing Magento in Romanian, chances are you searched GitHub or Google for "magento romanian language pack" and installed the first result: bratucornel/magento-2-romanian-language-pack. Six stars on GitHub, first result for the query, easy to spot. The problem is nobody has touched it since June 2021. Five years ago.

There is a better pack, actively maintained, updated last month. Almost nobody installs it because it has zero stars, sits under an organisation name most merchants have never heard of, and does not rank in the top three GitHub search results. This article is why you should switch.

What the numbers actually say

Two packs. One benchmark date: today.

The bratucornel pack has more total lines, but that is not a coverage advantage. It is 144 rows of English left untranslated, encoding artifacts from a broken conversion pipeline, and legacy Magento 1 CSV columns that Magento 2 does not need. What you see in the frontend is worse than what you installed.

What breaks when you install the stale one

Three things a merchant will notice in production, in this order.

1. Half of your admin UI has broken quotes and mangled characters. The bratucornel CSV has strings like PayPala€™s (should be PayPal's) and ® (should be ®). Those artifacts flow directly into the store admin and the invoice PDFs. Your CFO opens a Magento-generated PayPal invoice and reads "Termeni de plata PayPala€™s". Not a good look.

2. Missing diacritics all over checkout and the customer account. The bratucornel translations use "Selectati", "cumparaturi", and "atuci" (a typo for "atunci"). Your customer sees "Va rugam sa selectati o metoda de livrare" instead of "Vă rugăm să selectați o metodă de livrare". In Romanian, missing diacritics read as either lazy or foreign. In a country where fake and low-quality online stores are a real fraud vector, the visual signal costs you conversions.

3. Untranslated strings that stay in English. 144 lines where the "translation" is just the English source repeated. Anywhere those strings appear (payment methods, shipping, cart), your customer sees English text mixed into a Romanian store. Some are load-bearing: the PayPal Credit strings are anglicised because the translation was simply not done.

None of this is a fault of the bratucornel author. It was a good-faith community effort five years ago. The problem is nobody maintained it. Magento has shipped six major versions since then. The strings have changed. The bug fixes have not landed.

What magento-l10n actually is

magento-l10n/language-ro_RO is the community translation project synced from Crowdin, Magento's official translation platform. Every month or two, a bot commits fresh translations from Crowdin, so the pack tracks whatever the community has translated to date. In practice this means:

The pack ships as a standard composer package. You install it the same way you would install any other Magento module. No fork, no forced manual patch every time Magento core changes.

How to switch to the right pack

Three steps. If the stale pack is already installed, remove it first.

Install the maintained one:

Verify the switch: log in to admin, look at the bottom-right corner of the footer for the Magento version, then flip Stores → Configuration → General → Locale Options → Locale to Romanian. If your login screen no longer says "Selectati" and now reads "Selectați", the switch worked.

Why LIQUIDLAB cares about this

We ship Romanian merchants through Magento every week. Every one of them lands on the same GitHub search result, installs the same stale pack, and then discovers the problems six months later when a customer emails about broken checkout copy. We have watched this loop enough times to know the fix, and to actively contribute to the maintained pack rather than fork our own private one.

Contributing back to magento-l10n means our clients (and everyone else's clients, honestly) get better Romanian translations without any of us maintaining a private fork. The Crowdin project accepts contributions from anyone with a native-level Romanian reading of the string in context. If you speak Romanian and use Magento, you can improve the pack.

For our own client work, we bundle the magento-l10n pack by default on new builds and swap it in during a takeover if the previous team installed the stale one. It is a five-minute fix in code and a very visible fix in the storefront.

Where to go from here

If you are running Magento in Romania and the stale pack is still installed, take 15 minutes today to switch. The composer commands above cover it.

If you are evaluating Magento for a new build or a takeover, and the Romanian language pack question is one of a hundred small things you have to sort out, book a free strategy call. We will walk through your stack in 30 minutes, tell you what actually needs work, and hand you a plan.

Ready to switch, or to scope a Magento setup for Romania? Book a free strategy call with LIQUIDLAB.