See your dates in any locale before you ship

format(), translatedFormat() and isoFormat()

Carbon has three ways to turn a date into text, and only two of them are localized. format() is PHP's own DateTime::format() and always prints English names, whatever the locale: the table above shows "Saturday 14 March 2026" next to the translated rows. translatedFormat() takes the same PHP letters (l j F Y) and translates the day and month names. isoFormat() uses Moment.js-style tokens (dddd D MMMM YYYY) and adds locale-aware presets: LL, LLL and LLLL put day, month and year in the order each language expects, so "March 14, 2026" in English becomes "14. März 2026" in German. Use the presets when you do not want to own the word order for every language.

Month names are not one word per month

In Polish, Russian, Czech and other languages, a month alone and a month inside a date are different grammatical forms. Carbon knows this: isoFormat('MMMM') gives "marzec", while isoFormat('D MMMM') gives "14 marca". Pick pl above and compare the first and last month columns. Building a date by concatenating a day number with a month name from a lang file gets this wrong; let Carbon format the whole date instead.

Getting the locale into Carbon in Laravel

Carbon ships a Laravel service provider that listens for Laravel's LocaleUpdated event, so after App::setLocale('pl') a plain now()->isoFormat('LL') is already Polish. To format one date in a different locale, call ->locale('pl') on it, which returns the date with that locale without touching the global setting. Unlike Laravel's plural rules, Carbon accepts pt-BR and normalises it to pt_BR. Formatting does not change the timezone: this page treats the input as UTC, and in your app you would call ->setTimezone($user->timezone) before formatting.

Relative times and calendar()

In your app, $comment->created_at->diffForHumans() compares with the current time. So the table can be reproduced for any date, this page compares each offset with the date you picked instead, using the same "ago" and "from now" wording. calendar() is the friendlier sibling: "Yesterday at 3:09 PM" or "Wczoraj o 15:09" for nearby days, the weekday name within the week, and the locale's short date (the L preset) beyond that, which is why the two-week row prints a plain date.

Common mistakes

• Using format('F') in a Blade view and wondering why month names stay English.
• Hardcoding 'd/m/Y' for everyone. isoFormat('L') gives 14.03.2026 in Polish and 03/14/2026 in en_US.
• Assuming weeks start on Monday. They start on Sunday in en_US and pt_BR, and on Saturday in ar.
• Putting relative times in lang files. diffForHumans() already handles each language's plural forms, such as "2 godziny temu" against "5 minut temu".

The full walkthrough, with timezones and lang file advice, is in Localized dates in Laravel with Carbon. For numbers and money, see localizing numbers and currency in Laravel, and the glossary entry on date and time localization. The language guides cover date conventions for German, French, Spanish, Polish, Japanese and Arabic.