translations

Localization

Implementation

Localization is done with the Flask-Babel module.

Translated files live in translations/<Language Code>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po.

• ../messages.pot file contains found English strings. This is the "master list" of strings needing translation.
• messages.po files contain specific language translations.
• messages.mo files are binary, compiled versions of the .po files and should never be edited directly.

Extract new/edited English strings for translation

1. Search source files and extract strings into a file messages.pot

pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -o messages.pot --input-dirs=. --no-wrap

2. Update .po translations with new strings.

pybabel update -i messages.pot -d translations --no-wrap

When the .po files are pushed to any branch in the GitHub repo, they will be synced automatically with Crowdin for translation.

Updating translations on website

1. Look at the GitHub PR called New Crowdin translations which is generated and maintained automatically by Crowdin. This PR will always contain the latest .po files from our translators. Locally, merge this PR into master for testing.

2. If you're using Docker, you'll probably want to ssh into it, and then cd into the translations dir. (This will have the virtual environment set up with the pybabel tools.)

docker exec -it origin-website /bin/bash
# Then, in the container
cd translations

3. Fix common errors:

python fix_po_files.py

4. Compile translations into .mo files:

pybabel compile -f -d  .

The -f flag may be needed for entries that are marked as 'fuzzy'

5. Run the website locally to ensure things look good. (python main.py or restart docker container.)

6. Add and commit the compiled .mo files. This is requried to get them onto heroku.

git add *.mo
git add *.po
git commit -m "New translations compiled."

7. Merge to master, and push to heroku.

Adding a new language

pybabel init -i messages.pot -d translations -l <Language Code>

See pybabel docs for init

This will create the directory structure and initial .po file.

Edit config/constants.py and add the language-code under LANGUAGES

Test

In the origin-website directory, run:

python main.py

And you should see the new language on the site.

Troubleshooting

If you get this error:

  File "/Users/stan/Documents/Origin/origin-website/lib/python2.7/site-packages/babel/messages/pofile.py", line 147, in _add_message
    string = self.translations[0][1].denormalize()
IndexError: list index out of range

It most likely means that you have a % in a msgstr. These must be escaped as %%.