Lokalise is a service that helps you translated your application strings and keep a track of how those translations change. The idea of this plugin is that you can upload the translation strings to this services, then after translating them, download the translations and put them in the right directories for each locale.

First add the plugin to composer

composer require lorenzo/lokalise

Then activate the plugin

bin/cake plugin load Lokalise

Finally add your project id and lokalise API token to app.php

// config/app.php
...

'Lokalise' => [
    'project' => 'your project id',
    'api_token' => 'the api token as provided by lokalise'
]

You first need to run the i18n extract that is provided by CakePHP. This task will find all call for the __() of functions and generate at least one .pot file in the src/Locale folder

bin/cake i18n extract

Once this process is done, you can push your translations to lokalise. You need to be explicit about the locales you want to create/update in lokalise:

bin/cake lokalise push --locales en_US,fr_FR,pt_BR

You can now go to your lokalise dashboard and translated all the strings. In order to see the tranlated strings in your applicaiton, you need to download them back:

bin/cake lokalise pull