Frequently Asked Questions

Configuration

How to create an automated workflow?

Weblate can handle all the translation things semi-automatically for you. If you give it push access to your repository, the translations can happen 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.

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 from time to time when the translation file is changed in both Weblate and the upstream repository. You can usually avoid this by merging Weblate translations prior to doing some changes in the translation files (e.g. before executing msgmerge). Just tell Weblate to commit all pending translations (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 into the merge conflict, the easiest way is to solve all conflicts locally at your workstation - simply add Weblate as a remote repository, merge it into upstream and fix any conflicts. Once you push changes back, Weblate will be able to use the merged version without any other special actions.

Примечание

Depending on your setup, access to the Weblte repository might require authentication. When using Weblate built in Git exporter, you authenticate with your username and the API key.

# Commit all pending changes in Weblate, you can do this in the UI as well
wlc commit
# Lock translation in Weblate, again this can be done in the UI as well
wlc lock
# Add Weblate as remote
git remote add weblate https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/component/
# You might need to include credentials in some cases:
git remote add weblate https://username:APIKEY@hosted.weblate.org/git/project/component/

# Update weblate remote
git remote update weblate

# Merge Weblate changes
git merge weblate/master

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

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

# Open Weblate for translation
wlc unlock

If you’re using multiple branches in Weblate, you can work similarly on all branches:

# Add and update Weblate remotes
git remote add weblate-one https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/one/
git remote add weblate-second https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/second/
git remote update weblate-one weblate-second

# Merge QA_4_7 branch
git checkout QA_4_7
git merge weblate-one/QA_4_7
... # Resolve conflicts
git commit

# Merge master branch
git checkout master
git merge weblates-second/master
... # Resolve conflicts
git commit

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

In case of Gettext po files, there is a way to merge conflict in a semi-automatic way:

Get and keep local clone of the Weblate git repository. Also get a second fresh local clone of the upstream git repository (i. e. you need two copies of the upstream git repository: intact and working copy):

# Add remote
git remote add weblate /path/to/weblate/snapshot/

# Update weblate remote
git remote update weblate

# Merge Weblate changes
git merge weblate/master

# Resolve conflicts in the po files
for PO in `find . -name '*.po'` ; do
    msgcat --use-first /path/to/weblate/snapshot/$PO\
               /path/to/upstream/snapshot/$PO -o $PO.merge
    msgmerge --previous --lang=${PO%.po} $PO.merge domain.pot -o $PO
    rm $PO.merge
    git add $PO
done
git commit

# Push changes to upstream repository, 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 the Git repository that Weblate uses?

There is nothing special about the repository, it lives under the DATA_DIR directory and is named 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 a git server and let it serve the repository to the outside world.

Alternatively you can use Git exporter inside Weblate to automate this.

What are the options for 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 an automated workflow?)
  • You manually tell Weblate to push (it needs push access to the upstream repository)
  • Somebody manually merges changes from the Weblate git repository into the upstream repository
  • Somebody rewrites history produced by Weblate (eg. by eliminating merge commits), merges changes and tells Weblate to reset the content on the upstream repository.

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

How can I limit Weblate access to translations only without exposing source code to it?

You can use git submodule for separating translations from source code while still having them under version control.

  1. Create a repository with your translation files.

  2. Add this as a submodule to your code:

    git submodule add git@example.com:project-translations.git path/to/translations
    
  3. Link Weblate to this repository, it no longer needs access to the repository with your source code.

  4. You can update the main repository with translations from Weblate by:

    git submodule update --remote path/to/translations
    

Please consult git submodule documentation for more details.

How can I check if my Weblate is configured properly?

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

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

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

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

См.также

Component configuration

Usage

How do I review others translations?

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

How do I provide feedback on a source string?

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

How can I use existing translations while translating?

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

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

Does Weblate update translation files besides translations?

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

For monolingual files (see Supported file formats) Weblate might add new translation strings which are present in the template 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 a pre-commit hook 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.

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

The 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 languages in the administrative interface, you just need to provide information about it.

Can Weblate highlight changes in a fuzzy string?

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

For Gettext PO files, you have to pass the 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 show old translation strings when I’ve updated the template?

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

Примечание

It is usually a good idea to merge changes 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 want to do the update automatically, you can install addon Update PO files to match POT (msgmerge).

Troubleshooting

Requests sometimes fail with too many open files error

This happens sometimes when your Git repository grows too much and you have many 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

См.также

DATA_DIR

Fulltext search is too slow

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

./manage.py rebuild_index --optimize

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

./manage.py rebuild_index --clean

См.также

rebuild_index

I get «Lock Error» quite often while translating

This is usually caused by concurrent updates to the fulltext index. In case you are running a multi-threaded server (e.g. mod_wsgi), this happens quite often. For such a setup it is recommended to use Celery to perform updates in the background.

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

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

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

См.также

rebuild_index

Database operations fail with «too many SQL variables»

This can happen when using theSQLite 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 a powerful database engine for more information.

When accessing the site I get Bad Request (400) error

This is most likely caused by an improperly configured ALLOWED_HOSTS. It needs to contain all hostnames you want to access your Weblate. For example:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['weblate.example.com', 'weblate', 'localhost']

См.также

Allowed hosts setup

Features

Does Weblate support other VCS than Git and Mercurial?

Weblate currently does not have native support for anything other than Git (with extended support for GitHub, Gerrit 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.

Примечание

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

См.также

Version control integration

How does Weblate credit translators?

Every change made in Weblate is committed into VCS under the 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 the translation file format supports it, the file headers are updated to include the translator name.

См.также

list_translators

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

Weblate was designed in a way that every po file is represented as a single component. This is beneficial for translators, so 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.

Примечание

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.

Why does Weblate use language codes such sr_Latn or zh_Hant?

These are language codes defined by RFC 4646 to better indicate that they are really different languages instead previously wrongly used modifiers (for @latin variants) or country codes (for Chinese).

Weblate will still understand legacy language codes and will map them to current one - for example sr@latin will be handled as sr_Latn or zh@CN as sr_Hans.