translations

Localization

Status 2018-04-12

Code	Language	Status
ar	Arabic	🚧 Partial
de	German	✅ Complete
el	Greek	✅ Complete
es	Spanish	✅ Complete
fr	French	✅ Complete
he	Hebrew
hr	Croatian	✅ Complete
it	Italian	✅ Complete
ja	Japanese	✅ Complete
ko	Korean	✅ Complete
nl	Dutch	✅ Complete
pt	Portugese	✅ Complete
ru	Russian	✅ Complete
th	Thai	✅ Complete
zh_Hans	Chinese (Simplified)	✅ Complete
zh_Hant	Chinese (Traditional)	✅ Complete

Implementation

Localization is done with the Flask-Babel module.

Translated files live in translations/<Language Code>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po.

• ../messages.pot file contains found English strings. This is the "master list" of strings needing translation.
• messages.po files contain specific language translations.
• messages.mo files are binary, compiled versions of the .po files and should never be edited directly.

Extract new/edited English strings for translation

1. Search source files and extract strings into a file messages.pot

pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -o messages.pot --input-dirs=. --no-wrap

2. Update .po translations with new strings.

pybabel update -i messages.pot -d translations --no-wrap

The .po files are now ready for translation.

Updating translations on website

1. Download the new translations from Google Translator Toolkit. The file will be called archive.zip by default. (Note, you must download 2 or more languages to get a .zip file.)

2. In the translations directory, run:

python extract_po_files_from_gtt_zip.py ~/Downloads/archive.zip

This will grab the new .po files for each langauge, and copy them to the correct place. Note this will overwrite the existing .po files.

3. Fix common errors:

python fix_po_files.py

4. Compile translations into .mo files:

pybabel compile -f -d  .

The -f flag is needed to force the compile, since downloads from Google translator are always marked as 'fuzzy'

Note: .mo files must committed in the repo in order for them to get on heroku.

5. From repo root directory, run the website code to see new translations:

python main.py

Adding a new language

pybabel init -i messages.pot -d translations -l <Language Code>

See pybabel docs for init

This will create the directory structure and initial .po file.

Edit config/constants.py and add the language-code under LANGUAGES

Test

In the company-website directory, run:

python main.py

And you should see the new language on the site.

Troubleshooting

If you get this error:

  File "/Users/stan/Documents/Origin/company-website/lib/python2.7/site-packages/babel/messages/pofile.py", line 147, in _add_message
    string = self.translations[0][1].denormalize()
IndexError: list index out of range

It most likely means that you have a % in a msgstr. These must be escaped as %%.