Integrating with Weblate

Weblate basics

Project and component structure

In Weblate translations are organized into projects and components. Each project can contain number of components and those contain translations into individual languages. The component corresponds to one translatable file (for example GNU gettext or Android string resources). The projects are there to help you organize component into logical sets (for example to group all translations used within one application).

Internally, each project has translations to common strings propagated across other components within it by default. This lightens the burden of repetitive and multi version translation. The translation propagation can be disabled per Component configuration using Allow translation propagation in case the translations should diverge.

Importing localization project into Weblate

Weblate has been developed with VCS integration in mind as it’s core feature, so the easiest way is to grant Weblate the access to your repository. The import process will guide you through configuring your translations into components.

Alternatively, you can use Weblate to set up a local repository containing all the translations without integration.

Fetching updated translations from Weblate

To fetch updated strings from Weblate, you can simply fetch the underlying Git repository (either from filesystem, or it can be made available through Git exporter). Prior to this, you might want to commit any pending changes (see Lazy commits). You can do so in the user interface (in the Repository maintenance) or from the command line using Weblate Client.

This can be automated if you grant Weblate push access to your repository and configure Repository push URL in the Component configuration, see Pushing changes from Weblate.

Alternatively, you can use Weblate’s REST API to update translations to match their latest version.

Fetching remote changes into Weblate

To fetch the strings newly updated in your repository into Weblate, just let it pull from the upstream repository. This can be achieved in the user interface (in the Repository maintenance), or from the command line using Weblate Client.

This can be automated by setting a webhook in your repository to trigger Weblate whenever there is a new commit, see Updating repositories for more details.

If you’re not using a VCS integration, you can use UI or Weblate’s REST API to update translations to match your code base.

Adding new strings

In case your translation files are stored in a VCS together with the code, you most likely have an existing workflow for developers to introduce new strings. Any way of adding strings will be picked up, but consider using Quality gateway for the source strings to avoid introducing errors.

When the translation files are separate from the code, there are following ways to introduce new strings into Weblate.

Note

Availability of adding strings in Weblate depends on Manage strings.

Updating target language files

For monolingual files (see Supported file formats) Weblate might add new translation strings not present in the Monolingual base language file, and not in actual translations. It does not however perform any automatic cleanup of stale strings as that might have unexpected outcomes. If you want to do this, please install Cleanup translation files addon which will handle the cleanup according to your requirements.

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 yourself using Update source strings Import methods or using Update PO files to match POT (msgmerge) addon.