Frequently Asked Questions

Configuration

How to create automatic workflow?

Weblate can handle all the translation things semi-automatically for you. If you will give it push access to your repository, the translations can live without interaction unless some merge conflict occurs.

  1. Set up your git repository to tell Weblate whenever there is any change, see Notification hooks for information how to do it.
  2. Set push URL at your Component configuration in Weblate, this will allow Weblate to push changes to your repository.
  3. Enable push on commit on your Project configuration in Weblate, this will make Weblate push changes to your repository whenever they are committed at Weblate.
  4. Optionally setup cron job for commit_pending.

How to access repositories over SSH?

Please see Accessing repositories for information about setting up SSH keys.

How to fix merge conflicts in translations?

The merge conflicts happen time to time when the translation file is changed in both Weblate and upstream repository. You can usually avoid this by merging Weblate translations prior to doing some changes in the translation files (eg. before executing msgmerge). Just tell Weblate to commit all pending tranlslations (you can do it in the Repository maintenance in the Tools menu) and merge the repository (if automatic push is not enabled).

If you’ve already ran to the merge conflict, the easiest way is to solve all conflicts locally at your workstation - simply add Weblate as remote repository, merge it into upstream and fix conflicts. Once you push changes back, Weblate will be able to use merged version without any other special actions.

# Add remote
git remote add weblate git://git.weblate.org/debian-handbook.git

# Update remotes
git remote update

# Merge Weblate changes
git merge weblate/master

# Resolve conflicts
edit ....
git add ...
...
git commit

# Push changes to upstream respository, Weblate will fetch merge from there
git push

How do I translate several branches at once?

Weblate supports pushing translation changes within one Project configuration. For every Component configuration which has it enabled (the default behavior), the change made is automatically propagated to others. This way the translations are kept synchronized even if the branches themselves have already diverged quite a lot and it is not possible to simply merge translation changes between them.

Once you merge changes from Weblate, you might have to merge these branches (depending on your development workflow) discarding differences:

git merge -s ours origin/maintenance

How to export Git repository weblate uses?

There is nothing special about the repository, it lives under DATA_DIR directory and is named as vcs/<project>/<component>/. If you have SSH access to this machine, you can use the repository directly.

For anonymous access you might want to run git server and let it serve the repository to outside world.

What are options of pushing changes back upstream?

This heavily depends on your setup, Weblate is quite flexible in this area. Here are examples of workflows used with Weblate:

  • Weblate automatically pushes and merges changes (see How to create automatic workflow?)
  • You tell manually Weblate to push (it needs push access to upstream repository)
  • Somebody manually merges changes from Weblate git repository into upstream repository
  • Somebody rewrites history produced by Weblate (eg. by eliminating merge commits), merges changes and tells Weblate to reset contet on upstream repository.

Of course your are free to mix all of these as you wish.

How can I check if my Weblate is configured properly?

Weblate includes set of configuration checks, which you can see in admin interface, just follow Performace report link in admin interface or directly open /admin/performance/ URL.

Why are all commits committed by Weblate <noreply@weblate.org>?

This is default commiter name configured when you create translation component. You can also change it in the administration at any time.

The author of every commit (when underlaying VCS supports it) is still recorded correctly as an user who has made the translation.

Why do I get warning about not reflected changes on database migration?

When running ./manage.py migrate, you can get following warning:

Your models have changes that are not yet reflected in a migration, and so won't be applied.

This is expected as Weblate generates choices for some fields and Django migrations can not reflect this. You can safely ignore this warning.

Usage

How do I review others translations?

  • You can subscribe to any changes made in Subscriptions and then check other contributions in email.
  • There is review tool available at bottom of translation view, where you can choose to browse translations made by others since given date.

How do I provide feedback on source string?

On context tabs below translation, you can use Source tab to provide feedback on source string or discuss it with other translators.

How can I use existing translations while translating?

Weblate provides you several ways to utilize existing translations while translating:

  • You can use import functionality to load compendium as translations, suggestions or translations needing review. This is best approach for one time translation using compedium or similar translation database.
  • You can setup tmserver with all databases you have and let Weblate use it. This is good for case when you want to use it for several times during translating.
  • Another option is to translate all related projects in single Weblate instance, what will make it automatically pick up translation from other projects as well.

Does Weblate update translation files besides translations?

Weblate tries to limit changes in translation files to minimum. For some file formats it might unfortunately lead to reformatting the file. If you want to keep the file formattted in your way, please use pre commit hook for that.

For monolingual files (see Supported formats) Weblate might add new translation units which are present in the template and not in actual translations. It does not however perform any automatic cleanup of stale strings as it might have unexpected outcome. If you want to do this, please install pre commit hook which will handle the cleanup according to your needs.

Weblate also will not try to update bilingual files in any way, so if you need po files being updated from pot, you need to do it on your own.

Where do language definition come from and how can I add own?

Basic set of language definitions is included within Weblate and Translate-toolkit. This covers more than 150 languages and includes information about used plural forms or text direction.

You are free to define own language in administrative interface, you just need to provide information about it.

Can Weblate highlight change in a fuzzy string?

Weblate supports this, however it needs the data to show the difference.

For Gettext PO files, you have to pass parameter --previous to msgmerge when updating PO files, for example:

msgmerge --previous -U po/cs.po po/phpmyadmin.pot

For monolingual translations, Weblate can find the previous string by ID, so it shows the differences automatically.

Why does Weblate still shows old translation strings when I’ve updated the template?

Weblate does not try to manipulate with the translation files in any other way than allowing translators to translate. So it also does not update the translatable files when the template or source code has been changed. You simply have to do this manually and push changes to the repository, Weblate will then pick up the changes automatically.

Nota

It is usually good idea to merge changed done in Weblate before updating translation files as otherwise you will usually end up with some conflicts to merge.

For example with Gettext PO files, you can update the translation files using the msgmerge tool:

msgmerge -U locale/cs/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo locale/django.pot

In case you can want to do the update automatically, you can add custom script to handle this to POST_UPDATE_SCRIPTS and enable it in the Component configuration.

Troubleshooting

Requests sometimes fail with too many open files error

This happens sometimes when your Git repository grows too much and you have more of them. Compressing the Git repositories will improve this situation.

The easiest way to do this is to run:

# Go to DATA_DIR directory
cd data/vcs
# Compress all Git repositories
for d in */* ; do
    pushd $d
    git gc
    popd
done

Ver también

DATA_DIR

Fulltext search is too slow

Depending on various conditions (frequency of updates, server restarts and other), fulltext index might get too fragmented over time. It is recommended to optimize it time to time:

./manage.py rebuild_index --optimize

In case it does not help (or if you have removed lot of strings) it might be better to rebuild it from scratch:

./manage.py rebuild_index --clean

Ver también

rebuild_index

I get «Lock Error» quite often while translating

This is usually caused by concurrent updates to fulltext index. In case you are running multi threaded server (eg. mod_wsgi), this happens quite often. For such setup it is recommended to enable OFFLOAD_INDEXING.

Ver también

Fulltext search

Rebuilding index has failed with «No space left on device»

Whoosh uses temporary directory to build indices. In case you have small /tmp (eg. using ramdisk), this might fail. Change used temporary directory by passing as TEMP variable:

TEMP=/path/to/big/temp ./manage.py rebuild_index --clean

Ver también

rebuild_index

Database operations fail with «too many SQL variables»

This can happen with SQLite database as it is not powerful enough for some relations used within Weblate. The only way to fix this is to use some more capable database, see Use powerful database engine for more information.

Features

Does Weblate support other VCS than Git and Mercurial?

Weblate currently does not have native support for anything else than Git (with extended support for GitHub and Subversion) and ref:vcs-mercurial, but it is possible to write backends for other VCSes.

You can also use Git remote helpers in Git to access other VCSes.

Nota

For native support of other VCS, Weblate requires distributed VCS and could be probably adjusted to work with anything else than Git and Mercurial, but somebody has to implement this support.

How does Weblate credit translators?

Every change made in Weblate is committed into VCS under translators name. This way every single change has proper authorship and you can track it down using standard VCS tools you use for code.

Additionally, when translation file format supports it, the file headers are updated to include translator name.

Ver también

list_translators

Why does Weblate force to have show all po files in single tree?

Weblate was designed in a way that every po file is represented as single component. This is beneficial for translators, that they know what they are actually translating. If you feel your project should be translated as one, consider merging these po files. It will make life easier even for translators not using Weblate.

Nota

In case there will be big demand for this feature, it might be implemented in future versions, but it’s definitely not a priority for now.