Translating with Pootle
Creative Commons uses the online tool Pootle to manage translations of our software projects. NOTE: To translate pages on this wiki, see CcWiki:Translate.
The Creative Commons installation of Pootle is maintained at http://translate.creativecommons.org. This page describes how to use Pootle to edit translations, make suggestions, and see what the changes look like.
Applications currently managed by translate.creativecommons.org are:
- license engine and deeds
- search.creativecommons.org
- ccPublisher
- ccHost
Contents
Video tutorials
There are three video tutorials available:
- Tutorial 1: Setting up your account
- Tutorial 2: Making translations and suggestions with Pootle
- Tutorial 3: Admins: Managing suggestions and previewing at staging.creativecommons.org
Be sure to select the one you want to watch.
Language administrator tasks
There are a few things that only administrators of the language can do: accepting suggestions as translations, and committing translations to see how they look at staging.creativecommons.org.
Accepting suggestions
Handling suggestions in Pootle is very easy. If on in the translation screen you see a message reading, View Suggestions, you can click it to show the suggestions that have been made as well as the name of the user who made the suggestion.
If you want to act on those suggestions, click the Edit link at the end of the row. This will bring you to the full edit screen with that message selected.
You can click on the green check-mark or the red X; they will accept or reject the suggestion respectively. If you want to accept a modified version of the suggestion, you can click the green check-mark to accept the suggestion and then edit it in the translation field. Be sure to hit submit afterwards.
Creative Commons' "Staging" website
We run an experimental clone of the Creative Commons website at http://staging.creativecommons.org/. The cc_org translation catalog is made available in near-real-time in two places.
- The staging license chooser at http://creativecommons.org/license/ allows you to preview questions users see when they choose a license.
- The staging deeds at, for example, http://staging.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/ show the localized versions of the human-readable license deeds.
For both of these, appending ?lang=no lets you see the Norwegian translation; that should work for any short language code.
Committing translations
Language editors can use the commit facility in Pootle to permanently store their changes. Each commit is a permanent snapshot of the PO file. In addition, we only update staging.creativecommons.org once you commit.
As a result, the commit feature is very useful as as "preview" feature. To use it, you must have the commit privilege to a language in Pootle.
Start at the message catalogs page, as seen below:
Follow the link to 'Show Editing Functions, and you arrive at a page like this:
Click on "Commit," and after a somewhat substantial wait, you will see a message indicating that some files were committed. (If there are no changes, then Pootle will not actually perform a commit.) You can then expect that staging.creativecommons.org is up-to-date with respect to the language you are working on.
Pushing to the live site
WHen you are happy with your changes as they appear on staging.creativecommons.org, email webmaster@creativecommons.org to request that we update the main creativecommons.org website with your translations. You should expect a response saying it's done within a couple of work days at the longest.
Granting permissions
As a language administrator, you can grant privileges to other translators who have shown their ability to provide good-quality text. To do that,
Other information
Getting Help
If you have questions about using Pootle or about the translation process, you can ask in the IRC channel, or by sending an email to webmaster@creativecommons.org. If you are a CC affiliate on the CCi mailing list, you can use that instead.
Administering translations
Using suggestions
- ?
How to handle ${} strings
When you see ${license_name} in a string, that indicates a substitution (for the real license name). These are placeholders that the translation machinery uses; if you modify this placeholder, the real license name will never be substituted into your string.
As a result, DO NOT:
- Translate the text ("license_name") into your own language
- Remove the text
- Reverse the order of characters because you have a right-to-left language (ie, "{license_name}$")
New page contents
Creative Commons uses the online tool Pootle at translate.creativecommons.org to manage translations of our software projects. (To translate pages on this wiki, see CcWiki:Translate.)
Applications currently managed by translate.creativecommons.org are:
- license engine and deeds
- search.creativecommons.org
- ccPublisher
- ccHost
There are three Pootle tutorials you can watch and read:
