Admin Online Translation HOWTO

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Last updated: Sept 07, 2010Version comment
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Developer guide for working with Mifos internationalization, specifically as relates to making translation files work with the online translation tool.

Goals

  • strictly limit the proliferation of resource bundles to ensure manageability
  • support an extensible translatable string dictionary format to make life easy for translators

Overall i18n Architecture

Following the Cheetah i18n architecture guide "master" keys and translatable strings are in Java .properties format resource bundles. These .properties files will not contain underscores in their filenames. These files will be stored in source code version control.

Language-specific translations will also be stored in source code version control, but only in .po (portable object) format, like LOCALE/bundlename_LOCALE.po. Language-specific Java .properties format resource bundles needed by Mifos to display the application in a language other than the default will be generated during the build.

Notes

Things are still in development right now - we would like everything to run automatically from the maven build, but there are various shell scripts in the process right now. We're working to make this process smoother!

Required Software

  • Translate Toolkit - TT install page (required on all platforms. On Windows we suggest using the .exe installer)
  • Cygwin (required on Windows, to run the shell script)
  • On Mac OS, required python module lxml may not be installed by default. See installation instructions here.

General Guidelines

  • Before working with translation files, perform an update to pull the latest changes in source control into your working copy.
  • Use detailed log messages when committing. Mention why you made the change, refer to related issues, and link to related mailing list threads.
  • If you are doing anything directly on the .properties files, please notify the PM managing Online Translations as this might affect any existing translation work being done.
  • When operating directly on .po or .properties files (not via the online translation tool) watch for conflicts on the online translation tool server's working copy.

Converting legacy bundles

Create the directory to store .po files (for example, "fr") in mifos/src/org/mifos/config/localizedResources. Use capture_initial_locales.sh to convert legacy Java .properties-based resource bundles to .po format.

Follow with locale_sync.sh to clean up duplicate msgctxt strings and add fuzzy translations.

Adding new keys

  • add key and default translation to appropriate .properties file
  • run locale_sync.sh
    • On Windows, running from the Cygwin command, if you get errors like ./locale_sync.sh: line 3: $'\r': command not found then run dos2unix local_sync.sh and try rerunning it.
    • Also note before running ./locale_sync.sh in Cygwin you need to get to the windows directory your localized resource files are in. An example of doing this on C drive is: cd /cygwin/c/mifosinstallation/mifos-gazelle/application/src/main/resources/org/mifos/config/localizedResources
    • Note that currently this will update all .po files, even if no changes have been made to the corresponding .properties file. In the future this could be improved so that only the .po files affected by the new key were updated.
  • commit default .properties and LOCALE/*.po files

New .properties files will also be picked up by locale_sync.sh, but in general new keys should be added to existing .properties files.

Care should be taken to only add new default/master translations and translation files when absolutely necessary (see Goals . If you need some text, first check and see if it is already in a .properties file.

Some things to note:

  • Only the English (default) version of the .properties file should be translated. (As of this writing, non-English .properties files are still in version control, but they will be eliminated since they are generated from .PO files)
  • Running local_sync.sh requires the external software mentioned above. In the future, we plan to move the work performed by this script into the maven build in order to eliminate this step and its tool requirements.

Adding new languages

  • Locales are either made up of a single language code (for instance, en, for English language), or a combination of of a language code and a country code (en_US, for United States English). (Here is the Sun Java Locale page which has more info.)
  • create directory using the code for locale.
  • run locale_sync.sh
  • commit LOCALE/*.po files
  • a Pootle administrator also needs to add new translation files for this language to the Pootle server via the Pootle admin UI; make a request on the mifos-developer mailing list for this. * If you are the Pootle administrator, on the server that Pootle runs on, do this:
  • Enable the locale in the Mifos software by following AddingANewLocale

Making a build with language bundles

Property file bundles for non-English languages are generated by the create_props.sh script.

  • To generate a build with all language bundles, cd to the /mifos/src/main/resources/org/mifos/config/localizedResources directory, and run the create_props.sh script. This will generate all the locale-specific property files from the .po files.
  • The Hudson job for gazelle trunk runs this script automatically.
  • We would like to eliminate the shell scripts. One option is the Maven 2.x Gettext Plugin.

Bulk Updates

On neem:

sudo su - pootle svn update /var/lib/pootle/gazelle/*

Other operations can be performed as the pootle user, such as manually editing .po files and resolving conflicts.