Translating with Pootle/Administration

So you're an admin of some kind, and you want to:

All of this assumes you have a fully-prepared checkout of svn+ssh://svn@code.creativecommons.org/svnroot/i18n/trunk. One other important note is that CC uses two different types of PO files: The "normal" PO files with English keys, used by Pootle, and also PO files with logical keys, which are used by cc.engine to actually render the site.

• ./i18n/trunk/po = English-key PO files
• ./i18n/trunk/i18n = logical-key PO files (CC-style)

Note: most of this is relative to the project creativecommons.org and may or may not apply to other projects.

Fully-prepared checkout

To create a fully prepared checkout, do this:

$ svn co svn+ssh://svn@code.creativecommons.org/svnroot/i18n/trunk i18n-trunk
...
$ cd i18n-trunk
$ python bootstrap/bootstrap.py
...
Generated script '/some/path/i18n-trunk/bin/buildout'.
$ ./bin/buildout
...
Generated interpreter '/some/path/i18n-trunk/bin/python'.

Add a new string

./i18n/trunk/master/cc_org.po

As the directory name implies, this is the "master" PO file. This is a CC-style PO file. You add your new strings to this file using whatever naming rules might be in effect for the type of string you are adding. Commit your change.

./i18n/trunk/bin/sync

Once you have added your new string(s) you must run ./bin/sync with no arguments. This will propagate the new string(s) to all of the English-key PO files. Commit the many changes which should be visible in the ./i18n/trunk/po/ directory.

Make new string(s) available to Pootle

$ ssh translate.creativecommons.org
$ cd /var/www/translate.creativecommons.org/po/
$ svn up

Add an entirely new language

If you are adding a language which already exists for another country (e.g. Spanish), then you must create the language both in the i18n/ directory as well as in the po/ directory. Secondly, you must also enable it in Pootle. Finally, you should add a key to the master PO file that names the language.

Add a new language: (1) in your checkout

For our example we consider that the new language is es_PR, which is based on Spanish (es). For a language not obviously derived from a different one, you can consider it based on US English (en_US).

First, change directory into your fully-prepared checkout. Then execute these commands to clone Spanish, keeping only the PO file:

$ svn copy i18n/es i18n/es_PR
$ cd i18n/es_PR
$ svn rm --force *.stats *.prefs *.pending
$ cd ../..
$ svn copy po/es po/es_PR
$ cd po/es_PR
$ svn rm --force *.stats *.prefs *.pending
$ cd ../..
$ svn ci -m "Created Puerto Rico PO directory using Spain's as a base" i18n/es_PR po/es_PR

Add a new language: (2) in Pootle

Now log into Pootle's PO files repository and make your files available there:

$ ssh translate.creativecommons.org
$ cd /var/www/translate.creativecommons.org/po/cc_org/
$ svn up i18n/es_PR po/es_PR

At this point, you should go to http://translate.creativecommons.org/admin/languages.html and ensure the language is associated with the cc_org project (and any others) using the Pootle interface.

Add a new language: (3) update master PO file

Since you've just added a new language, this is also a good time to add a translatable string for the language name itself. This is done by using the steps outlined above in Add a new string. Using the example above, you should add the following to ./i18n/trunk/master/cc_org.po:

msgid lang.es_PR
msgstr "Spanish (Puerto Rico)"

Change an English string

Changing an English string is done precisely like Adding a new string, with the exception that you modify an existing string in ./i18n/trunk/master/cc_org.po instead of adding a new one.