GettextForTranslators

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Revision as of 21:37, 11 October 2021 by Octalot (talk | contribs) (Major rewrite for a target audience of translators other than the per-language maintainer)

Gettext for translators

The target audience of this page is anyone who wants to help with a language that's already in the list on WesnothTranslations. The files for these languages have already been set up, someone is already the maintainer, and the pages linked from that page say where to go and how to introduce yourself to the team. The effort is split with separate teams for each language, and each team can have its own working style.

Because each team can work in different ways, please do not submit translations as pull requests on Github. While that seems like a good idea, it causes potential complications, so we ask that everyone talks to their language's maintainer and submits changes in the way that the maintainer decides to use.

If you're starting a completely new translation, or taking over as the maintainer of a translation, then the next place to read would be the WesnothTranslationsHowTo page.

Textdomains and getting the files to translate

The progress for each language is shown on https://www.wesnoth.org/gettext/ . Click on your language, and you'll see a breakdown into sections (textdomains), such as

  • wesnoth
  • wesnoth-editor
  • wesnoth-help
  • wesnoth-units
  • wesnoth-lib (contains strings shared by game and editor)
  • wesnoth-httt (the Heir to the Throne campaign)
  • wesnoth-utbs (the Under the Burning Suns campaign)
  • etc

Each has a separate file with a .po extension. For example, the Swedish translation has abbreviation sv, and its translation of the editor's strings is in wesnoth-editor/sv.po. The page on https://www.wesnoth.org/gettext/?view=langs&version=branch&lang=sv links to the current version in the main Git repository.

Although the .po files contain text, please send the complete files as email attachments (or whichever method your team uses), rather than cutting and pasting lines from the file into an email. The translated strings are very sensitive to formatting and whitespace changes.

Files when running the game

When the game runs it will look for an .mo file, for example translations/sv/LC_MESSAGES/wesnoth-editor.mo. If you want to test your text in-game and you're happy to modify your installation:

  • Some .po editors can automatically generate .mo files.
  • Deleting the .mo file will make the game look for translations/wesnoth-editor/sv.po instead.

However you can also send your untested .po file to the maintainer and they should check that it looks correct in-game.

How to translate

Now that you have the .po file to edit, it can be worked on using any of the programs listed in the Tools section. The general preference in Wesnoth seems to be towards Poedit, but they all work on the same .po file format.

The general concept is that the GUI will show the strings in English, along with a text-box to add the translation.

Warnings

Some editors can automatically detect inconsistencies between the English and the translated text, for example if the original ends with a full-stop and the translation ends with an exclamation mark. Poedit defaults to showing these above even the untranslated strings, but these can be false-positives - generally someone's already looked at these and decided that the translated text is better as-is.

Fuzzy strings

One of the downsides of Gettext is that spelling and grammar corrections in the English text break the link between the original and the translated text. The tools that generate .po files try to recover from this by using the old translation for the new English text, and marking the string as fuzzy; in Poedit these are sorted below the completely untranslated strings, and shown with the "Needs Work" button lit along with a note about what the previous English text was.

Be wary, this mechanism can also generate incorrect suggestions. For example it may decide that "Landar left $number troops to guard the council" is a spelling correction of "Kalenz left $number troops to guard the council".

FAQ

  • What's a fuzzy string?
    • It's a string calling for translator revision. For example, if an English string gets a small change and you run the msgmerge program, it will mark the translation of that string fuzzy. When we switched to gettext we marked all translations as fuzzy as lots of them were outdated.
  • What are "Plural-forms"?
    • Some languages have different word forms for different numbers of things (for example in English we have "1 thing" but "2 things"). The rules are different for different languages. You can find them here.
  • My language needs a different font to get displayed correctly.
    • Wesnoth uses several different fonts, and the number is likely to grow with the support for new alphabets/writing systems. Right now we are using DejaVuSans (Roman and Cyrillic), FreeSans (Greek), sazanami-gothic (Japanese) and gkai00mp (Chinese). In the wesnoth/sv.po you will find a string containing the currently used fonts. By changing the order of fonts listed, you choose which font is preferred for your translations. A language using Greek letters would for instance translate that string with:
  msgid "DejaVuSans.ttf,FreeSans.ttf,sazanami-gothic.ttf,gkai00mp.ttf"
  msgstr "FreeSans.ttf,DejaVuSans.ttf,sazanami-gothic.ttf,gkai00mp.ttf"

Note that if a certain letter/glyph is not found in the first font listed, the second font will be scanned for it and so on.

  • What should I do to insert a newline in a string?
    • If you want to insert a newline in a string you need to include the pair of characters "". You can use normal newlines as you wish as they don't affect the translation.
  • How do I use ' within a single-quote delimited string when translating text= in help screen texts?
    • Add a backslash before it.
  • What should I do with strings like "Prefs section^General"?
    • There are ambiguous strings which should be translated in a different way depending on where they appear. For example, we have "General" in the preferences as "General preferences" and we can also have "a General". These strings can have different translations for a given language, so we use "context" to solve this. The prefix only tries to give a hint about the string, and should be not translated, for example:
  msgid "Prefs section^General"
  msgstr "General"
  • My PO file already has that translated to "Prefs section^General", should it work?
    • It does, but probably shouldn't. For strings that have no translation, the part before the "^" will be removed. This is also done when the PO's msgstr is exactly the same as the msgid, which will later break if someone makes any change to the text. For example:
  # wrong but seems to work (shows as "Root")
  msgid "filesystem_path_system^Root"
  msgstr "filesystem_path_system^Root"
  # wrong and shows as "filesystem_path_system^Wurzel"
  msgid "filesystem_path_system^Root"
  msgstr "filesystem_path_system^Wurzel"
  • Who can I ask for further information?
    • You can ask Ivanovic, Torangan, ott, Yann or Isaac in IRC (irc.freenode.net, #wesnoth or #wesnoth-dev).

If you don't like IRC, send a mail to crazy-ivanovic AT gmx DOT net, or pm him (ivanovic) at the forum.

  • How do I quickly test PO file changes?
    • When you modify a PO file, run "make update-gmo" in the main po directory to create a new MO file, then run "make install" there to install the new MO file.
    • Then force cache rebuild. This is tricky -- if you only update MO files, the game may use a cached (i.e., old) version letting you wonder why it still displays the old translation. Either change game.cfg modification time, e.g. with "touch /usr/local/share/wesnoth/game.cfg", or delete the corresponding cache[s] in ~/.wesnoth/cache.
  • I don't know what make is and where to get it. Can I still quickly test PO file changes?
    • Yes you can. Fist, you will need to get an editor for .po files like Poedit or Virtaal.
    • Create a temporary folder to put the .mo files in.
    • Poedit automatically creates an .mo file when you save, in Virtaal choose File -> Export.
    • Name your .mo files according to the text domain and put them into your temporary folder, e.g. for wesnoth-lib/<language_code>.po the .mo file will be called wesnoth-lib.mo.
    • Go to the folder your Wesnoth installation is in, e. g. C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Battle for Wesnoth <version number> in Windows 7.
    • Go to the translations folder and check if there is a subfolder for your language code. If there isn't, create one, then in the new subfolder create a folder called LC_MESSAGES.
    • Copy your .mo files to LC_MESSAGES and restart Wesnoth.
  • The .po file in the repository has changed, how do I move over the translations I've made?
    • If your file with additional translations is called old.po and the new file from the repository is called repo.po, create a new file called new.po by doing
  msgmerge -o new.po old.po repo.po

The new file new.po will keep your translations from old.po as well as the new strings from repo.po, but check the result -- some translations will not be possible to move across if the original strings changed, these are kept as comments at the end of the file.

  • How to generate man files from wesnoth-man(current 1.3 trunk) .po files?

To create "real" manpages out of the po files you have to install a prog named "po4a" and run make update-po4a inside the maindir before running make and make install. They are not automatically created out of po files. With that command the files will be created and afterwards installed.

Note: At least 80% of the .po file must be translated for the creation of a man file

  • Why is the diff from the previous version so huge? I have only made a small change to the .po file with poedit.
    • When saving .po file poedit unwraps all strings. Usually, all .po files are wrapped at 80 characters so if you want smaller diffs and less merge conflicts you can execute the following commands each time after editing with poedit:
  msgattrib file.po > file.po1
  mv file.po1 file.po

Tools

There are several tools to work with .po files:

Of course, you can edit po files with any UTF-8 capable text editor, but the tools listed above have great advantages over any text editor regarding .po translation, like going to next fuzzy/untranslated string, searching only in specific fields (msgid, msgstr, comment), ...

See Also

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