Talk:Pootle
Preliminary
The Goal is to manage SME translations with Pootle hosted on contribs.org. The current method excellent as it is makes it hard to find missing strings and to easily replace them.
Once we have everything worked out how to interact with pootle and the formmagick stuff then I'll get something up on contribs.org that everyone can use. It would be really nice if we could automate the extraction/import of files that need to be translated into pootle but first things first.
Slords 18:23, 24 January 2008 (MST)
Pootle Usage
Test pootle site: http://www.unixlan.com.ar:8888
untranslated words
click "Show Editing Functions" and finally at "Quick Translate" for each file or whole language.
Also you can see the suggestions clicking at "Review Suggestions".
checks
click "show checks" to see a list of syntax errors
acronyms 6 strings (2%) failed brackets 17 strings (6%) failed doublequoting 4 strings (1%) failed doublespacing 1 string (0%) failed endpunc 11 strings (3%) failed endwhitespace 4 strings (1%) failed numbers 2 strings (0%) failed puncspacing 2 strings (0%) failed sentencecount 2 strings (0%) failed simplecaps 16 strings (5%) failed startcaps 6 strings (2%) failed unchanged 7 strings (2%) failed untranslated 53 strings (19%) failed
click on one of the links offered and fix them
See http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/guide/pofilter_examples and http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/guide/translation/commonerrors
Merging new strings
Add, remove or modify strings in the template/*.pot file then click 'update from template'.
- New strings are added
- modified strings use existing data and made fuzzy (i think)
- deleted strings are moved to the bottom of the file and commented out with #~
Formagick
we are using http://linux.die.net/man/1/xml2po to convert the xml lexicons to .po files and back
I have packaged for a better installation. You can download from
http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/nhall/sme7/contribs/pootle/rpm/gnome-doc-utils-0.12.0-1.noarch.rpm
Before try, you must edit a few lines. [ we now use /usr/share/xml2po/smetrans.py ]
/usr/share/xml2po/empty.py
Line 27 from "return ['base', 'A', 'a', 'i', 'I', 'B', 'b' ,'P' ,'p' ,'h2' ,'H2', 'div', 'DIV', 'font'] Line 31 from "return []" to "return ['trans']" Line 35 leave "return []" Line 39 from "return []" to "return ['trans']" // or ['lang'] testing
Create .po and export xml files
we have written a few shell scripts, which are automating checking, we'll release later for contribs authors
bugs
- newxml needs to set: lang="fr"
- sed script or look at
- xml2po -l fr -p yum.po yum > yum.xml
- -l --language=LANG Set language of the translation to LANG
- you can't have a <base> equal to a <trans>
Console
update all .po files
- Templates have been implemented with up to date strings,
- now it's over to users to translate them
.po file names are inconsistent, SV & FR add .tmpl.po
- .tmpl.po is correct, other languages have been updated
Use UTF-8 for console .po files
- Pootle has problems with the current charset=iso-8859-1
- we now use UTF-8
revision control using CVS/SVN
Today I had a quick look at the pootle pages and found a wiki as well, which has some valuable information like for instance revision control using CVS/SVN: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/version_control - Cactus 03:26, 25 January 2008 (MST)
progress
we'll look at this later, perhaps starting with contribs
Remarks
Translation Workflow
Draft suggestions ...
The original files are in cvs.
.po files
- gettext strings are in various files in cvs, currently we think we have them all in pootle as .pot template files
- we need to use xgettext to search a maintained list of files to extract current gettext strings
- this may find missing, or modified strings or remove old strings saving on pointless translations
- existing translations have been placed in pootle and merged with the templates
- this shows missing translations very nicely and is ready for user testing
- all .po files have been converted to UTF-8, they can be converted back easily if necessary
- changes to original files, ie changed gettext strings, have to be tracked as usual in the bug tracker
- these are imported into the templates, other languages are updated with a click
- at some point we diff against cvs po files, the patch is checked and applied.
FormMagick files
- these are XML files with a <base> and <trans> pair of strings, these can be converted to .po files with some work
- some rough scripts are being worked on above, there may be others on the net waiting to be found...
- we need to clean up some inconsistencies in the english lexicons and they will be our .pot templates
- we need to script the conversion of existing translations into .po files, discussed above
- changes to original files, have to be tracked as usual in the bug tracker
- the following is speculative ...
- these are imported into the .pot templates, other languages are updated with a click
- I think any new <base> strings have to be added to the cvs xml file for each language
- at some point we run xml2po to apply the new translation back to the xml file,
- then diff against cvs, make patch, check and apply
Pootle issues
UTF-8
Bug created, 'Use UTF-8 for console .po files' http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3858
- SME Translation files currently use iso-8859-1
- we currently convert any file in pootle to UTF-8
- we can convert back when returning to SME if necessary, by adding one line in a script.
Testing Pootle I have found a few issues. I will try to describe.
Pootle (and Translation Toolkit used by Pootle) use as default a charset UTF-8. Everytime I have create a new language translation, Pootle parse from templates encoding as UTF-8. Everytime I have "Update from templates" the target PO files are updated as UTF-8, and if target has set charset=iso-8859-1, it is then corrupted. I can't found a method to set Pootle to use ISO-8859-1 as default. Because this, and to avoid these issues I have decide to use UTF-8 as charset in Pootle. Please see http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/guide/locales/glibc?s=charset#editing
Not only Pootle. Every desktop translation tool set UTF-8 as default charset.
If you want to merged or override a PO file, convert to UTF-8 (if not yet). Then you can upload without corrupt the target file.
One note for admins when Pootle run at contribs.org: I suggest to use a tool for convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 before make a new language rpm update package (if gettext can't support utf-8 encoding).
I have use this great script to convert between any charset files in a directory:
#!/bin/bash
#./dir_iconv.sh dir cp1251 utf8 - converts all files from directory dir .. cp1251 (windows-1251) to utf8.
ICONVBIN='/usr/local/bin/iconv' # path to iconv binary
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
echo "$0 dir from_charset to_charset"
exit
fi
for f in $1/*
do
if test -f $f
then
echo -e "\nConverting $f"
/bin/mv $f $f.old
$ICONVBIN -f $2 -t $3 $f.old > $f
else
echo -e "\nSkipping $f - not a regular file";
fi
done
This apply also to panels (if formmagick can't support UTF-8 encoding)
There is an open posibility to modify Pootle or translation toolkit to make this automatically, but I don't know how to do. --Normando Hall 12:45, 2 February 2008 (MST)
- . Formmagick supports UTF-8: http://search.cpan.org/~mitel/CGI-FormMagick-0.89/lib/CGI/FormMagick.pm
- . GetText does support UTF-8 as well: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Charset-conversion
- It is quite common for translations/lexicons to be in UTF8 as this is a well known locale independent character set, probably also the reason why Pootle is sticking to UTF-8. - Cactus 15:01, 2 February 2008 (MST)