Starting with internationalization

You have a project and want to to translate it into several languages? This guide will help you to do so. We will showcase several usual situations, but most of the examples are generic and can be applied to other scenarios as well.

Before translating any software, you should realize that languages around world are really different and you should not make any assumption based on your experience. For most of languages it will look weird if you try to concatenate sentence out of translated segments. You also should properly handle plural forms because many languages have complex rules for that and the internationalization framework you end up using should support this.

Last but not least, sometimes it might be necessary to add some context to the translated string. Imagine translator would get string Sun to translate. Without context most people would translate that as our closest star, but you might be actually used as abbreviated name of day of week…

Translating software using GNU Gettext

GNU Gettext is one of the most widely used tool for internationalization of free software. It provides simple yet flexible way to localize the software. It has great support for plurals, it can add further context to the translated string and there are quite a lot of tools built around it. Of course it has great support in Weblate (see GNU Gettext file format description).

Примечание

If you are about to use it in proprietary software, please consult licensing first, it might not be suitable for you.

GNU Gettext can be used from variety of languages (C, Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript and much more) and usually the UI frameworks already come with some support for it. The standard usage is though the gettext() function call, which is often aliased to _() to make the code simpler and easier to read.

Additionally it provides pgettext() call to provide additional context to translators and ngettext() which can handle plural types as defined for target language.

As a widely spread tool, it has many wrappers which make it’s usage really simple, instead of manual invoking of Gettext described below, you might want to try one of them, for example intltool.

Sample program

The simple program in C using Gettext might look like following:

#include <libintl.h>
#include <locale.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void)
{
    int count = 1;
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
    bindtextdomain("hello", "/usr/share/locale");
    textdomain("hello");
    printf(
        ngettext(
            "Orangutan has %d banana.\n",
            "Orangutan has %d bananas.\n",
            count
        ),
        count
    );
    printf("%s\n", gettext("Thank you for using Weblate."));
    exit(0);
}

Extracting translatable strings

Once you have code using the gettext calls, you can use xgettext to extract message from it:

$ xgettext main.c -o po/hello.pot

This creates template file, which you can use for starting new translations (using msginit) or updating existing ones after code change (you would use msgmerge for that). The resulting file is simply structured text file:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2015-10-23 11:02+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=INTEGER; plural=EXPRESSION;\n"

#: main.c:14
#, c-format
msgid "Orangutan has %d banana.\n"
msgid_plural "Orangutan has %d bananas.\n"
msgstr[0] ""
msgstr[1] ""

#: main.c:20
msgid "Thank you for using Weblate."
msgstr ""

Each msgid line defines a string to translate, the special empty string in the beginning is the file header containing metadata about the translation.

Starting new translation

With the template in place, we can start first translation:

$ msginit -i po/hello.pot -l cs --no-translator -o po/cs.po
Created cs.po.

The just created cs.po has already some information filled in. Most importantly it got proper plural forms definition for chosen language and you can see number of plurals have changed according to that:

# Czech translations for PACKAGE package.
# Copyright (C) 2015 THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# Automatically generated, 2015.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2015-10-23 11:02+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2015-10-23 11:02+0200\n"
"Last-Translator: Automatically generated\n"
"Language-Team: none\n"
"Language: cs\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ASCII\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=(n==1) ? 0 : (n>=2 && n<=4) ? 1 : 2;\n"

#: main.c:14
#, c-format
msgid "Orangutan has %d banana.\n"
msgid_plural "Orangutan has %d bananas.\n"
msgstr[0] ""
msgstr[1] ""
msgstr[2] ""

#: main.c:20
msgid "Thank you for using Weblate."
msgstr ""

Updating strings

Once you add more strings or change some strings in your program, you execute again xgettext which regenerates the template file:

$ xgettext main.c -o po/hello.pot

Then you can update individual translation files to match newly created templates (this includes reordering the strings to match new template):

$ msgmerge --previous --update po/cs.po po/hello.pot

Importing to Weblate

To import such translation into Weblate, all you need to define are following fields when creating component (see Component configuration for detailed description of the fields):

Field Value
Source code repository URL of the VCS repository with your project
File mask po/*.po
Base file for new translations po/hello.pot
File format Choose Gettext PO file
New language Choose Automatically add language file

And that’s it, you’re now ready to start translating your software!

См.также

You can find a Gettext example with many languages in the Weblate Hello project on GitHub: <https://github.com/WeblateOrg/hello>.

Translating documentation using Sphinx

Sphinx is a tool for creating beautiful documentation. It uses simple reStructuredText syntax and can generate output in many formats. If you’re looking for an example, this documentation is also build using it. The very useful companion for using Sphinx is the Read the Docs service, which will build and publish your documentation for free.

I will not focus on writing documentation itself, if you need guidance with that, just follow instructions on the Sphinx website. Once you have documentation ready, translating it is quite easy as Sphinx comes with support for this and it is quite nicely covered in their Internationalization Quick Guide. It’s matter of few configuration directives and invoking of the sphinx-intl tool.

If you are using Read the Docs service, you can start building translated documentation on the Read the docs. Their Localization of Documentation covers pretty much everything you need - creating another project, set it’s language and link it from master project as a translation.

Now all you need is translating the documentation content. As Sphinx splits the translation files per source file, you might end up with dozen of files, which might be challenging to import using the Weblate’s web interface. For that reason, there is import_project management command.

Depending on exact setup, importing of the translation might look like:

$ ./manage.py import_project --name-template 'Documentation: %s' \
    --file-format po \
    project https://github.com/project/docs.git master \
    'docs/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/**.po'

If you have more complex document structure, importing different folders is not direcly supported, you currently have to list them separately:

$ ./manage.py import_project --name-template 'Directory 1: %s' \
    --file-format po \
    project https://github.com/project/docs.git master \
    'docs/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/dir1/**.po'
$ ./manage.py import_project --name-template 'Directory 2: %s' \
    --file-format po \
    project https://github.com/project/docs.git master \
    'docs/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/dir2/**.po'

См.также

The Odorik python module documentation is built using Sphinx, Read the Docs and translated using Weblate.