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Introduction

This package contains a set of tools to help manage translations in Python software.

Babel extraction plugins

lingua contains two extraction plugins for Babel:

Detailed information on using Babel extraction plugins can be found in the Babel documentation.

Translating via spreadsheets

Not all translators are comfortable with using PO-editors such as Poedit or translation tools like Transifex. For them lingua has simple tools to convert PO-files to xls-files and back again. This also has another benefit: it is possible to include multiple languages in a single spreadsheet, which is helpful when translating to multiple similar languages at the same time (for example simplified and traditional chinese).

The format for spreadsheets is simple: the first column lists the canonical text, and all further columns contain a translation for the text, with the language code on the first row. Fuzzy translations are marked in italic.

Converting one or more PO-files to an xls file is done with the po-to-xls command:

po-to-xls -p nl nl.po texts.xls

This will create a new file texts.xls with the Dutch translations. The -p parameter can be given multiple times to include more languages:

po-to-xls -p zh_CN zh_CN.po -p zh_TW zh_TW.po -p nl nl.po texts.xls

This will generate a file with all simplified chinese, traditional chinese and Dutch translations.

Translations can be merged back from a spreadsheet into a PO-file using the xls-to-po command:

xls-to-po nl texts.xls nl.po

This will take the Dutch (nl) translations from texts.xls and use those to upgrade the nl.po file.

Sanity checking

Lingua includes a simple polint tool which performs a few basic checks on PO files. Currently implemented tests are:

  • duplicated message ids (can also be checked with msgfmt). These should never happen and are usually a result of a bug in the message extraction logic.
  • identical translations used for multiple canonical texts. This can happen for valid reasons, for example when the original text is not spelled consistently.

To check a po file simply run polint with the po file as argument:

polint nl.po

Translation:
    ${val} ist keine Zeichenkette
Used for 2 canonical texts:
1       ${val} is not a string
2       "${val}" is not a string