Translating with Pootle/Administration

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

All of this assumes you have a read/write 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.

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 a new language to an existing project

If you are adding a language which already exists for another country (e.g. Spanish), then the easiest thing to do is, for example:

$ ssh translate.creativecommons.org
$ cd /var/www/translate.creativecommons.org/po/cc_org/
$ sudo su pootle
$ cp -a es es_PR
$ rm -rf es_PR/.svn
$ rm ./es_PR/*.stats ./es_PR/*.prefs ./es_PR/*.pending
$ svn add es_PR
$ svn ci -m "Created Puerto Rico PO directory using Spain's as a base" es_PR

If you are creating a language that doesn't already exist for some other country, then you can create that language at [1] and then add it to a given project using the Pootle interface. You could also follow the steps above, using en_US as a base (in the example above substitute 'es' with 'en_US').

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.