Difference between revisions of "Translation"

Latest revision as of 15:53, 13 May 2024

Tip

Use Google translation and select your language to get a machine translation of this document.

The concept of this document is to give you step-by-step instructions on how to create or update translations and other localization tasks for the gnucash project.

There are related pages for

programmers: I18N and

project maintainers: Language_Administration.

Overview

GnuCash has several separate areas that need translations or localization, which are by priority:

The Glossary

A reference in form of a message catalog with terms that are commonly used throughout GnuCash's other components and their explanation. Preferably it should be translated first for each new language to define a consistent terminology for the other parts.

The Program

Its message catalogs contain all text messages for the application's user interface. Not all are equally important though.

Please read at least #Adjust special messages and #Special characters and other tips, if you use one of that services.

The Windows Installer

It contains some 20 strings.

The Account Templates

A set of ready to use account chart snippets for personal users that can be mixed and matched into a full chart of accounts during the creation of a new a new GnuCash file with currently 115 translatable account names.

• If your government or other authorities offer specific templates for business users, you can create them, too.

The Documentation

The Help Manual and the Tutorial and Concepts Guide. These documents explain how to use GnuCash. They are written in DocBook, an XML variant.

The Website

While mostly written in PHP/HTML, it uses message catalogs, too.

• In theory one could also translate recent announcements from the news directory into the language specific subfolder, but ususally there are more important tasks around.

The Income Tax Tables

They require some knowledge of your regional tax rules and are related to account templates.

Currencies

GnuCash uses the translation of the ISO 4217 currency codes and names. This are maintained by the ISO Codes Team. If your language is missing or has issues contact them or contribute:

• Optionally you can #Check Files in Repo gnucash's doc Directory files, too.

Available Resources

There are many resources to support you at gnucash.org and other places. Don't hesitate to use them.

gnucash.org

We have collected a bunch of useful information for you here in this wiki -

navigate from the main page, or the Special:Categories or use the search function -

and on the website https://www.gnucash.org/.

And we have several channels of communication and a few other useful tools:

IRC

The fastest way to get help on simple questions is using the internet relay chat IRC, as many of the developers hang out there and are eager to help.

Mailing lists

Translators will probably find two or three gnucash mailing lists of interest. If you can not find the answers to your questions in their Mailing_Lists#Mailing List Archives, feel free to ask them.

• For language and region specific questions, where you should discuss terms and ask for proofreading of your work, use your languages mailing list. Currently we have

  gnucash-[pt_]br, de, es, fr, it, nl.

If none exists for your language or nobody has an answer there, use the english lists:

• General use questions and answers are found on the gnucash-users mailing list,
• specific development questions go to the gnucash-devel list.

• If you dislike the heavy traffic on the above lists, you should at least subscribe the gnucash-announce list to get informed about new :releases.

To subscribe or view archives of these lists follow the links to the Mailing Lists.

weblate.org

Since 2020-12-14 the translations of some components, currently Glossary, Program and Website, are available at GnuCash @ Hosted Weblate.

Requirement

Only a web browser on your PC or mobile.

Features

• Most pages of weblate have a help page behind the ? button.
• Already as anonymous you can add suggestions and comments.
• After you created there an account, you can edit the translations.

  Tip

  If you also have a GitHub account and linked it there, we can give you some feedback on your contributions.

• If you already have been a GnuCash translator, tell us

  on irc://irc.gnome.org/gnucash (help about IRC) or

  by a mail to the gnucash-devel list your Weblate name to become a weblate/GnuCash reviewer there.

Note

We appreciate any help on the optimal configuration by experienced weblate users. You can contact the GnuCash team by irc://irc.gnome.org/gnucash or Mailing Lists.

Other Web Based Translation Tools

Several services for translation coordination exist, see Improve Localization Process#Web Based Translation Tools. As we have no experience with them contact the gnucash-devel mailing list before using them.

translationproject.org

The Translation Project coordinates the message cataloges of several programs

Up to Gnucash 4.9 (2021-12)

some of our translators had used it: last files. Most of them are now using Weblate.

Classical Direct Contribution

If you want to work on a new translation and you want to submit it directly to GnuCash, read on.

If you're starting a new translation it's much easier to begin with a tarball, which will include po/gnucash.pot; if you start from a Git clone you'll have to build Gnucash yourself first to generate gnucash.pot.

On Other Sites

Technical Reference

For many components we use the Gettext package. If you need help with msg* commands or the .po file format, read it's manual.

General Translations Guidelines and Tips

General information about how to approach the translation of software can be found here:

Weblate

• https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/

Gnome

As GnuCash is GTK based we follow their rules for consistency.

• In GNOME Human Interface Guidelines the most important section is writing-style, but also keyboard-input is of interest for the program.
• GNOME Documentation Style Guide V1.6
• https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject
• https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject/LocalisationGuide

KDE

• The KDE Translation HOWTO

Other Useful Sites

• Often, but not always, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ has a good explanation and proper language links for special terms.

Comparing articles on wikipedia in your language and english can be helpful.

• There are many online dictionaries, use a search engine like google, to find the best fitting.
• An index of on-line dictionaries and a lot of other resources can be found at www.yourdictionary.com.
• In special cases the terminology database of the European Union Inter Active Terminology for Europe can be used, too.

How to submit changes directly to GnuCash

There are several options to contribute to the GnuCash translations:

Weblate

We recommend to use Weblate for existing languages as it has additional checks and other nice features compared to the pure gettext tools.

Online

One hour after you stopped editing it will create a commit on your behalf in its current pull request.

Offline

If you want to work offline, you can download the po file, edit it with your preferred editor, and upload it again. Weblate will then format it in the referred way before commiting it to its current pull request.

Tip

If you have a GitHub account linked to your weblate account you will get informed and can follow the process.

Pull Requests at GitHub

Pull requests are common for all parts which are not covered by weblate.

If you already are a github user you can publish your work as a separate branch on your gnucash[-{[ht]docs|on-windows}] fork and send a pull request to the GnuCash team. If you wish to continue your work before the request was completed, simlply create a new working branch. After the pull request was completed you can delete the related branch again. See Git for details.

Commit messages

1. Start your commit message with L10N:<LL>:

   were <LL>—or ${LL} below—is your language code.

2. Append the intended improvement

Example

L10N:de: Update of SKR49 to official 2023 release

Verify the Result

After it got merged, you can …

Website

immediately open {https://www.gnucash.org/

Program

the next day download the (Linux) Flatpak or Windows nightly

to see and test the reslut of your work.

Obsolete Ways

Use they only if you have good reasons not to use one of the ways mentioned before!

Patches at Bugzilla

Before it was recommend to use Bugzilla. :

• Create an account if you still have none or login,
• create an request for enhancement bug against the Gnucash component translations, choose the version on which your patch is based and
• attach a patch

containing the diff between the old files - if any - and your new files:

• If you have Git installed, the easiest way to create the patch is git format-patch origin/stable..stable.
• Else you can use diffutils: diff -u[r] <original path> <modified path> > <name>.patch. See info diff for details.

Mailing lists

You can simply email your completed message catalog (.po file) to the developers at the gnucash-devel mailing list. We'd really rather you use Github or Bugzilla because those are much less likely to get lost or forgotten, but if you really find those too hard we'll try to accommodate you on the list.

Translating the Program

To begin a translation you need either the message template file (gnucash.pot) if you're starting a new translation or the existing message catalog (xx.po or xx_YY.po, where xx is the ISO code for your language and YY the ISO code for a language-variant locale, see Naming Convention). These files are in the gnucash sources, which you can obtain either from our git repository or by downloading the latest release tarball from Sourceforge.

Get the source from Git

GnuCash uses Git as version control system. If it is new for you read An Introduction to Git.

The first thing to do is usually, to download the latest stable branch of gnucash from git and get it to build.^[1]

git clone https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash ${SOURCEDIR}
cd ${SOURCEDIR}
git checkout stable

The argument ${SOURCEDIR} above can be whatever you want your local directory to be called, and is optional in the first line. If you leave it out, you'll have a directory called gnucash created containing all the source code below your current working dir.

git clone https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs gnucash-docs
cd gnucash-docs
git checkout stable

Update your repository

git pull --rebase

from anywhere in the tree of ${SOURCEDIR}. We recommend to do it daily when you start your work.

Get packages, which are used while building

• Dependencies contains the list of packages, which are used while building GnuCash. If some are missing the configuration by cmake or the build by make or ninja will fail.
• For working on .po files we use several commands starting with msg. This are part of gettext-tools.

Caution

Gettext versions < 0.20 are known not to extract the 'developer_name' xml node, which contains the msgid "GnuCash Project". Do not remove this msgid!

• Optional

  Translate Toolkit is already used by Weblate and other projects. While gettext offers only a few formal checks Translate Toolkit has many quality checks in its pofilter command.

Under Linux use your package manager and install them.

Steps in the Build System

GnuCash uses the cmake build generator to control the build of all components. Details are described in Building. The following short-form instructions work on Unix systems and assume that you have already set up the dependencies according to the FAQ. If you are building the unstable or master branches you'll need to use your package manager to install two more development packages, boost-all-devel and googletest.

Build system generation

cd /path/to/gnucash # replace the example path with your real source path
mkdir ../gnucash-build
cd ../gnucash-build

cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../gnucash-install ../gnucash

This will set up a proper build system in the build directory based on the CMakeLists.txt file in the source directory. If generation fails or if you want to refine your build consult Building.

path/to/
  gnucash/          # directory with gnucash sources
  gnucash-build/    # directory to build gnucash and its translation in
  gnucash-install/  # directory to install final result (not needed for development, just for completeness)

Compile

It is recommended that you compile the gnucash source code. It is a good idea to actually run gnucash with your new translations because it is quite helpful to see the phrases in the context of the running program.

Compilation is done by executing the make command in the build directory.

Note

Experienced users may prefer to use Ninja instead of Make. How to so is beyond the scope of this page.

cd ${BUILDDIR} # e.g. path/to/gnucash-build/
make

Run

cd ${BUILDDIR} # e.g. path/to/gnucash-build/
./bin/gnucash # will open gnucash you just built

Note the use of './bin/' in the line to execute gnucash. This is to make sure you run the gnucash executable you just built rather than one that's installed by your distribution. Omitting this explicit path specification in the command will cause your system to launch

gnucash #  will open your distribution's pre-installed gnucash

In either case, you can easily switch between the various languages the gnucash has available by placing the LANG env var before the call to the executable. You can find details in Locale Settings.

Documentation

The GnuCash Help Manual and the Tutorial and Concepts Guide can use the same CMake build system as the code.

1. git clone gnucash-docs or unpack a gnucash-docs tarball
2. Using a terminal, go to your gnucash-docs directory

   cd /path/to/gnucash-docs # replace the example path with your real path
   

3. Make a build directory next to your source directory and go into it

   mkdir ../gnucash-docs-build
   cd ../gnucash-docs-build
   

4. Configure the build system

   cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../gnucash-docs-install ../gnucash-docs
   

   These commands will set up a directory structure as follows:

   path/to/
     gnucash-docs/          # directory with gnucash-docs sources
     gnucash-docs-build/    # directory to generate gnucash-docs in various formats
     gnucash-docs-install/  # directory to install final result (not needed for development, just for completeness)
   

5. still in your build directory run

   make html
   

${BUILDDIR}/share/doc/${LOCALE}/gnucash-guide/index.html

${BUILDDIR}/share/doc/${LOCALE}/gnucash-manual/index.html

where ${LOCALE} is one of C, de, it, ja, or pt (English, German, Italian, Japanese, or Portuguese respectively). You can use the file: URL scheme to point your browser to one of them; the links will work from there.

Naming Convention

The language code is of the following form:

<language>[_<REGION>][.<Charset>][@modifier]

using the well known ISO codes 639-1 for languages and 3166-1 for regions, which are in most cases countries .

• Only if no 2 letter code exists for your language in ISO_639-1, use the 3 letter code from ISO_639-2.

• If you are the first translator for your language, you should
  • name your files and directories only with your language code.
  • set Language: in the header of your po file with the full (language and region) code, if significant.

So all people using your language despite of their region will benefit from your work.

• If there are parts, which are specific for your region, e.g. business account templates respecting local law, then they should be in a <language>_<REGION> directory.
• The common charset in gnucash is utf8.
• In the rare case different scripts are used for the same language like kyrilic and latin add for the less used the modifier e.g. sr@latin.

In the following parts of this document 'XXXX' and 'LL'—often prefixed by $ to mark them as variable—refer to your language code.

The glossary file

Inside the po/glossary/ directory should be a "glossary" file for your language. This file contains a bunch of commonly used terms found in GnuCash - and the explanation of a few very specific for GnuCash like the disambiguation between bill, invoice and voucher. It is recommended that you get this file translated first, and use it as a guide when translating the real .po file or the documentation. Please keep in mind that this file will never be visible to a user! The glossary file is only a tool for you, the translators! I repeat: The strings from the glossary file will never be user-visible, they are only used by you, the translator.

Todo

The current files have a very informal form. To make them more useful like conversion in tool specific glossary formats, we should replace

msgid "generic term: term"

by

msgctxt "generic term"
msgid "term"

1. Go into the glossary directory:

   cd po/glossary/
   

2. If your .po glossary file does not exist or is older than gnc-glossary.txt, create the template:

   ./txt-to-pot.sh gnc-glossary.txt > gnc-glossary.pot
   

3. Create or update your language's glossary file:
   • If your .po glossary file does not exist,
   1. use this gnc-glossary.pot file to create it with

      msginit # add -l<locale> if different from your settings
      

   2. Add your file into the set_dist_list(po_glossary_DIST ...) command in glossary/CMakeLists.txt

      set_dist_list(po_glossary_DIST CMakeLists.txt bg.po ca.po da.po de.po el.po es_NI-policy.txt es.po fr.po gnc-glossary.txt he.po
              hr.po hu.po it.po nb.po nl.po pl.po pt_BR.po pt.po ru.po rw.po sk.po sv.po txt-to-pot.sh vi.po zh_CN.po zh_TW.po)
      

      to get it into the tarball.
   3. After changing CMakeLists.txt you have to rerun

      cmake # add your options
      

   • If your .po glossary file exists, but is older than gnc-glossary.txt use the msgmerge program to update it:

     msgmerge --previous -U $LL.po gnc-glossary.pot;
     

4. Now open your language's glossary file and translate it completely.
5. Don't forget to #Check syntax and statistics of your .po file.

Terms missing or inadequate in the glossary file

If you detect an important term which is missing or could be better explained,

• create a pull request at github

for the source file gnc-glossary.txt.

Msgid<TAB>Comment

Reminder

Does your editor enter <TAB>s or will it replace them with <Space>s?

To test it, run the following steps after you changed gnc-glossary.txt:

1. To generate a new gnc-glossary.pot:

   ./txt-to-pot.sh gnc-glossary.txt > gnc-glossary.pot
   

2. run above msgmerge command for your LL.po,
3. check and translate the new string in this updated glossary file.
4. If successful, update all *.po files with:

   for i in *.po; do echo -n "$i:"; LANG=C msgmerge --previous -U $i gnc-glossary.pot ; done
   #old form: find *.po -exec /usr/bin/msgmerge --previous -U '{}' gnc-glossary.pot \;
   

Note

The last step can also be done by a maintainer.

LANG=C is only recommend for maintainers to get english error messages.

Get a fresh template

The Portable Object Template (.pot file) is a collection of all translatable strings.

It is important, to repeat this step e.g. after you asked a developer to change an insufficient string or you got an announcement about changed strings like commit messages starting with "I18N: " or containing a "[I18N]" flag.

Tip

If you have problems with this section, you download instead the "current template" from the translationproject.org. But keep in mind it is based on the last release and does not contain recent changes.

1. If your repository is no fresh checkout, you should first #Update your repository:

   git pull --rebase
   

2. Only on the first run see Building to set up your build environment depending on your OS.

   Note

   As you can use make or ninja, on this page we write always make <target>. If you decided to use ninja, execute ninja <target> instead.

3. Then in gnucash, a specific command at the top-level of the build tree (or source tree, if you do not use a separate build directory) will perform all necessary steps for this:

   cd ${BUILDDIR} # adjust ${BUILDDIR}
   make pot
   

4. If make complains make: *** No rule to make target `<path/to/missing-source-file>', needed by `gnucash.pot'. Stop. there are obsolete relicts from a previous build. Just run

   make clean  # remove obsolete files
   make pot    # try it again
   

5. Now go into the po directory:

   cd ${SOURCEDIR}/po # adjust ${SOURCEDIR}
   

If your language file already exists, continue with #Update an existing .po file.

Build a new .po file

If there is no .po file for your language, then you can start a new one. Start by

msginit [-lLL[_RR]] [-i<path/to/>gnucash.pot]

where LL is your language and RR your region code, if there is already a different LL.po like e.g. pt and pt_BR.

-i<path/to/>gnucash.pot is required, if you use a separate build dir,

-l... is only required, if your target is different from your environments current language.

This will initialize the meta information with values from your user environment.

Notes

msginit 0.21.1

seems not to know languages spoken in and around India very well. Replace

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=INTEGER; plural=EXPRESSION;\n"

by

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1;\n"

—or whatever is right— in the new created file.

msginit 0.19.3

is querying an obsolete address of the translation project for language teams, but that doesn't matter.

If that does not work you can copy the file gnucash.pot into a work file named LL.po and just edit this file.

Adjust the header

Only if it was not created by msginit and updated via weblate the top of the .po file should be edited slightly.

Header Comments

The comments at the top of the file should be changed to be current:

# Indonesian translations for GnuCash package.
# Terjemahan bahasa Indonesia untuk paket GnuCash.
# Copyright (C) 2020 by the GnuCash developers and the translators listed below.# This file is distributed under the same license as the GnuCash package.
# Triyan W. Nugroho <triyan.wn@gmail.com>, 2020.
# […]

Copyright

Only files which were once maintained by the #translationproject.org should have a FSF copyright for that time range.

Perhaps we should use and update a copyright year range?

Translator List

Weblate will expand the copyright comment by a list of

<Translator name> <email address>, year[ range]

in historical order. You can later copy the list into translator-credits ideally in reverse order.

Conventions of your team (optional)

This is also a good place to record typographic conventions, if more than one person work on the file:

#
# Konventionen/Tastenkürzel:
# »Zitate«: [AltGr]+{[Y]|[X]}
# Gedankenstrich — [AltGr]+[Shift]+[-]

Header Record

The first, empty msgid "" contains information for you and the gettext tools. Each line of the msgstr contains a capitalized entry, a colon and a value. Replace all variables (uppercase words) with something appropriate. In this case, you will be the first author of the translation, and also the

Last-Translator

your name and email address, usually set by weblate. This person responsible for the recent change set, so we need an email address to contact you if there are issues.

Language-Team

Most languages are maintained by teams and everybody wants to get informed. That is usually the weblate language team. Before #translationproject.org or the german Gnucash translator team have been in use.

If you are not using weblate enter the teams name and email address. If you are no member of a team, keep it empty or write NONE.

Tip

You can reuse this line in translator-credits.

Language

Already set by msginit it should be the same as the filename without extension, usually the ISO code of your language.

Project-Id-Version

<Package name> (set by msgint) and <Version> (updated on msgmerges).

Report-Msgid-Bugs-To

Should already been set by msginit to https://bugs.gnucash.org/buglist.cgi?roduct=GnuCash&component=Translations or similar, where you can report issues with the msgids like

• "There is a typo in <msgid>" or
• "<msgid> is impossible to translate to <your language> because of the grammatical difference …"

if nobody reacts on your comments in weblate.

POT-Creation-Date

gets updated by msgmerge.

PO-Revision-Date

The timestamp of the last modification.

• Weblate and editors with a specific po mode should update it automatically.
• If you use a normal text editor, you will have to do it manually.

Content Section

Do not change

"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

but replace its older forms like

"CHARSET: UTF-8\n"
"ENCODING: 8bit\n"

with the recent form.

Plural-Forms

msginit should have set it properly. E.g. many slavian languages have complexer rules than English's

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1;\n"

See Gettext Manual: Translating Plural Forms for details.

See the full explanation in Gettext Manual: Header Entry.

• Remove the `#, fuzzy' line once you have specified the items in capitals, because once this is done the header entry is no longer fuzzy.

Adjust special messages

• There is currently one special string:

  #: gnucash/gnome-utils/gnc-main-window.c:4737
  msgid "translator-credits"
  msgstr ""
  "Christian Stimming, 2001-2021\n"
  :
  "Jan-Uwe Finck, 1999\n"
  "\n"
  "Anregungen, Kritik und Fragen zur Übersetzung an die\n"
  "deutschsprachige GnuCash-Gemeinschaft <gnucash-de@gnucash.org>\n"
  "Um die Moderation zu vermeiden, empfiehlt sich die Anmeldung auf der\n"
  "<a\
   href=\"https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-de\">Liste "
  "gnucash-de</a>"
  

This will appear in Help->About->Credits->Translation. So you should enter your name or that of your team and an email address where users can contact you for typos and gifts.

Tip

After some time more persons would have worked on the translation. Then you can expand it from your header comments to:

msgstr ""
"<current translator>, <years>\n"
"<previous translator>, <years>\n"
:
"<first translator>, <years>\n"
"\n"
"Send suggestions, critizism and questions about this translation to\n"
"Klingon speaking GnuCash community <gnucash-tlh@gnucash.org>\n."
"To avoid moderation we recommend to subscribe at\n"
"<a
# This comment exists only to trick the spamfilter. Rejoin the surrounding lines again.
 href=\"https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-tlh\">List gnucash-tlh</a>"
# Don't forget to replace Klingon (tlh) by your language and translate the rest!

If a list exists, we suggest to remove the email address of individuals for data protection reasons.

Prepopulate your file with translations from your glossary and other projects

The basic idea is decribed in Gettext Manual: Using Translation Compendia. Your translator tools might already support compendia. If not, i.e you are using a plain text editor, here is the manual way:

There are in total 3 programms in use:

msgcat

Concatenates and merges the specified PO files.

msgmerge

Merges two or more Uniforum style .po files together.

msgattrib

Filters the messages of a translation catalog according to their attributes or manipulates their attributes.

Example

To merge a compendiumn like our glossary:

cd ${SRCDIR}/po
# Gettext manual's suggestion to merge compendia without old po file:
msgmerge --compendium glossary/${LL}.po -o ${LL}.po /dev/null ${BUILDDIR}/po/gnucash.pot
# Perhaps better:
msgmerge -U ${LL}.po --compendium glossary/${LL}.po ${BUILDDIR}/po/gnucash.pot

GOffice

Gnucash has borrowed a couple of source files from goffice. Those files contain a number of translatable strings. The goffice translation teams have already put effort in translating those in many languages. To reduce our translation effort, the script linked in I18N#Borrowing Code can be used to import these translations into our own po files.

If the goffice part for your language is incomplete, you might consider to offer them to update their file with your work.

GTK3

Stock buttons became deprecated in their version 3.10. They included:

1. a label with mnemonic,
2. for which the translation was already done in the gtk domain,
3. a unique icon was associated.

So they are no longer used since gnucash 3.0. We use still the same labels, but the GTK translation is not directly used.

You can save some work by merging the po file of your language from GTK3, i.e. from https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/tree/gtk-3-24/po into your gnucash po file.

Example

To merge fitting translations from GOffice and GTK:

#Example to merge common parts from po files in GOffice and GTK

# Variant A: in single steps to watch their results
## 1. join 3. party translations
msgcat --use-first -o tmp.po ${LL}.po ${GOFFICEPATH}/po/${LL}.po ${GTKPATH}/po/${LL}.po
## 2. Remove unused messages. Authoritativ is gnucash.pot:
msgmerge tmp.po ${BUILDDIR}/po/gnucash.pot | msgattrib --no-obsolete > {$LL}.po
rm tmp.po

# Variant B: in one command:
msgcat --use-first ${LL}.po ${GOFFICEPATH}/po/${LL}.po ${GTKPATH}/po/${LL}.po | \
msgmerge ${BUILDDIR}/po/gnucash.pot | \
msgattrib --no-obsolete > {$LL}.po

Adjust po/CMakeLists.txt

# Set of available languages:
set (ALL_LINGUAS ar as az bg brx ca cs da de doi el en_GB es es_NI et eu fa fi fr gu he hi hr hu id it ja kn ko kok kok@latin ks lt lv mai mni mni@bengali mr nb ne nl pl pt pt_BR ro rw sk sr sv ru ta te tr uk ur vi zh_CN zh_TW)

CMakeLists.txt is a file, which controls the configuration of the build process. So after changing it, you have to rerun cmake. Some IDEs like Eclipse will do it automagical for you.

As part of the build your LL.gmo file is generated in the po directory of your build tree. Finally make install will copy it to the place, where it will be found at runtime. If you forget one of the steps, your translated language will not appear.

Continue with #Translating the .po file.

Update an existing .po file

Before you begin actual translation work, you should update the gnucash.pot file and use this to update your .po file. This process will insure that you have the latest translatable strings.

msgmerge --previous -U LL.po gnucash.pot

Note

If you had choosen a separate build directory, e.g. .build, adjust the path in above command:

cd ${SRCDIR}/po # adjust ${SRCDDIR}
export BUILDDIR=../build # adjust this
msgmerge --previous -U LL.po ${BUILDDIR}/po/gnucash.pot

Separate commits for "noise" and real work

You should now run git commit or create a patch "L10N:<locale>: Merge recent template".

This will contain only the "noise" from the updated pot file as usually many line numbers change.

Diff example after msgmerge

 #. Business options
-#: ../src/app-utils/app-utils.scm:303
-#: ../src/business/business-gnome/gncmod-business-gnome.c:117
+#: ../src/app-utils/app-utils.scm:322
+#: ../src/business/business-gnome/gncmod-business-gnome.c:119
 msgid "Business"
 msgstr "Geschäft"

Hiding your real changes in hundreds of such sections will make it really hard for your coworkers to find them.

After having done your translation you submit a second commit or patch containing your actual work "Update <locale>.po".

You should also do it, if your current translation tool uses other format settings like line breaks as the previous tool. In this case just open the file, save it and git commit or create a patch "L10N:<locale>: Preparation: Reformating".

Example in KBabel format

#: ../src/app-utils/business-prefs.scm:33
msgid "The format string to use for generating customer numbers. This is a printf-style format string."
msgstr "Используемая строка форматирования для создания номеров клиентов. Её формат соответствует printf."

Example in PoEDit format

#: ../src/app-utils/business-prefs.scm:33
msgid ""
"The format string to use for generating customer numbers. This is a printf-"
"style format string."
msgstr ""
"Используемая строка форматирования для создания номеров клиентов. Её формат "
"соответствует printf."

Review the file header

• Project-Id-Version should be GnuCash 5.9 and

<tt>POT-Creation-Date should be recent. If they are not, you probably forgot #Get a fresh template or #Updating an existing .po file.

• The PO-Revision-Date should be >= POT-Creation-Date.

Some, but not all tools will do this reliably for you.

Translating the .po file

Finally. You are ready to do some translating!

The .po source files are plain text files.

Tools

Some plain text editors offer a specific syntax highlighting for .po files, but there are also specific tools you can use:

• Emacs has a po-mode to edit po files.
• Geany, an editor with sytax highlighting and a little bit more
• GTranslator is another tool but we recommend not to use it because the version of 2006 doesn't support all of the interesting elements inside the po file. Update this, if you know it is fixed.
• Lokalize is the successor of KBabel since KDE4.
• Poedit to finish the PO file edit and build.

Version 2.1.1 had issues

• POEditor can be used online.
• Pology is a Python library and collection of command-line tools for in-depth processing of PO files. Recommended in the Gettext Manual, but last released 2014-07-24.
• translate-toolkit is a python based suite. It is also used by sevices like weblate.
• Wikipedia:
  • List of translation software
  • Comparison of computer-assisted translation tools

(feel free to add more tools here)

Gettext source (.po) file format

Record Format

<empty or only white-space>
#  translator-comments
#. extracted-comments
#: reference…
#, flag…
#| msgctxt previous-message-context
#| msgid previous-untranslated-string
msgctxt optional-message-context
msgid untranslated-string
msgstr translated-string

• The empty or only white-space line is the record separator.
• In translator-comments you can put your own notes.
• The extracted-comments are notes from the programmers for you.
• One or more references tell you, where the message appears in the sources.
• The most important flags will be explained below in # Common Flags and source language format flag will be explained below.
• The previous-* entries will only appear, after msgmerge --previous … for fuzzy messages to show what changed.
• An optional-message-context has the purpose to distinguish equal msgids with different meanings.
• The msg* should explain themself above.