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 built 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. 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 its language and link it from main project as a translation.

Now all you need is translating the documentation content. Sphinx generates PO file for each directory or top level file, what can lead to quite a lot of files to translate (depending on gettext_compact settings). You can import the index.po into Weblate as an initial component and then configure 组件发现 addon to automatically discover all others.

组件配置

组件名称	文档
文件掩码	docs/locales/*/LC_MESSAGES/index.po
新翻译的译文模版	docs/locales/index.pot
文件格式	gettext PO 文件
翻译标记	rst-text

组件发现配置

用于匹配翻译文件的正则表达式	docs/locales/(?P<language>[^/.]*)/LC_MESSAGES/(?P<component>[^/]*)\.po
自定义组件名称	Documentation: {{ component|title }}
为新的翻译条目指定译文模版文件	docs/locales/{{ component }}.pot

提示

Would you prefer Sphinx to generate just single PO file? There is a hacky way to achieve this (used by Weblate documentation) by overriding Sphinx way to get a Gettext domain of a document. Place following snippet to your Sphinx configuration in conf.py:

import sphinx.transforms.i18n
import sphinx.util.i18n

# Hacky way to have all localized content in single domain
sphinx.transforms.i18n.docname_to_domain = (
    sphinx.util.i18n.docname_to_domain
) = lambda docname, compact: "docs"

This might be directly supported by Sphinx in future releases, see <https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/784>.

参见

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