GNOME

GNOME is a feature rich Linux graphical desktop environment. The project has quite an established localisation initiative.

Since this page has been created, many things in GNOME has changed, and they have good documentation and infrastructure to help translators.

The most important documentation for translating GNOME is therefore at the GNOME website: http://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject/

The rest of this document is kept in place for the time being, but a lot of it is now out of date and not 100% accurate any more.

Essential Reading

Please familiarise yourself with these before proceeding:

Useful URLs

Translating

This is a roughly sequential outline of the steps you need to take to translate GNOME into your language.

Joining the mailing list

Subscribe to the gnome-i18n mailing list

GNOME Glossary

Start with GNOME Glossary to create consistency across future GNOME localisations.

Start with the latest versions in of GnomeGlossary.csv in CSV format and convert to PO using the csv-to-pot.sh script. The layout is slightly different from the layout created by po2csv so you cannot convert the created POT file to a Translate Toolkit style CSV file.

If you need to translate using CSV instead of PO then rather edit the GnomeGlossary.csv and manipulate it into a PO file later.

However, please note that the glossary itself is several years old and not maintained anymore (confirmed by last maintainer), so don’t depend heavily on it. Instead, use it as a reference, and build all necessary glossary term as needed.

What files first

Advice from Christian Rose on the GNOME team.

Application Strings Description
gtk+ 1126 toolkit, very largish, but many messages are developer-oriented and can safely be ignored to begin with, but some few messages here are very visible to the end user
libgnomeui 305 many user-visible menus and stuff
gnome-mime-data 350 user-visible file type desc. etc
libbonoboui 96  
gnome-vfs 80 file size formatting etc
yelp 71 help browser
gedit 640 text editor
nautilus 1449 file manager, also very largish, but not all messages here are immediately visible to the end user, even though many are
gnome-desktop 88  
gnome-panel 587  
gnome-session 103  
gnome-control-center 649  
gdm2 629 login manager
eog 170 image viewer

… and then the rest in desktop + developer-libs.

FIXME use podebug to get a better targeting on these files.

Committing translations

Translations can be committed directly from Damned lies in most cases. In the rare occasions where this won’t work, you can ask on the gnome-i18n mailing list and someone should be able to do it for you. If you really need a git account, you should read the git related pages listed on the wiki

Targeting a release

GNOME follows a regular 6 monthly development cycle with even numbered stable releases and odd number development releases. The release schedule will help you decide which release to target.

If your team is moving quickly it might be good to target a stable minor release. This will also be the platform that most users will be on. It also presents the chance to have multiple releases as you move through each minor release. Otherwise, it would be more realistic to spend translators’ effort on next major stable release.

Translation Status Page

The translation status page keeps up to date statistics on the progress of each language, your language should appear as soon as your first file is committed to CVS.

Setting up your Bugzilla Component

FIXME I think this information is probably completely wrong or Ie misunderstood it completely it was a long time ago … DB

You need a Bugzilla component so that users of your language can report errors, follows these instructions to create one for your language.

This information courtesy of Christian Rose. You should return these details to him at: menthos at gnome oeg.

You need to supply:

  • language code
  • language name (in English)
  • language name (spelled in the language itself. We actually don’t use this info in Bugzilla but on the http://www.gnome.org/i18n/ page. Please replace non-ASCII characters with proper HTML escape sequences. See the HTML source code of that page for examples)
  • default owner (must be a valid bugzilla account). The default owner is the person who should be assigned the bugs by default. If he or she doesn’t have a bugzilla account, he or she can create one at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/createaccount.cgi.
  • default qa contact (must be a valid bugzilla account). The default QA contact is usually the person who should make sure the bug was fixed properly by the assignee. If the qa contact person doesn’t yet have a bugzilla account, he or she can create one at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/createaccount.cgi. This field is optional, you don’t need to decide on a default qa contact if you don’t want to.
  • component description. Usually of the form “Here you can place your bugs about $LANGUAGENAME [$LANGUAGECODE] translations”. Example: “Here you can place your bugs about Swedish [sv] translations”. If you have the possibility, try also to translate this into ASCII-only English, and we’ll use the translation as well.

You have the option of assigning this the bug reports to a mailing list:

If you want, there’s also the possibility to use a mailing list instead of an individual for the default owner and/or default qa contact fields. It’s a bit more complicated; among other things you need access to the mailing list configuration. Here is what you should do if you want a mailing list in one or both of the fields above:

  • Create a bugzilla account for your mailing list, i.e. a Bugzilla account with your list’s address as account name.
  • Subscribe the bugzilla daemon address (bugzilla-daemon@widget.gnome.org) to your mailing list, but also disable ALL mail from the mailing list to this address (If it’s a Mailman mailing list you can change bugzilla-daemon@widget.gnome.org’s mailing list options to NOMAIL).

Application Specific

There are some applications that need specific treatment. These are those:

gdm2

The login manager needs patches to gui/gdmlanguages.c and config/locale.alias to add your languages. Email your patch to “George”

Suggested bug report and related email for adding English (Canadian), use as a reference:

Also Arabic issue highlights how it all fits together:

Actual CVS diffs to add Afrikaans, Northern Sotho and South African English

Translating Documentation

Update

A large number of GNOME docs are now available for translation, via the gnome-doc-utils package, in both XML and PO format. This number is increasing steadily. We can look forward to having all GNOME docs available in both formats. Here is the current list:

http://kvota.net/doc-l10n/by-modules.html

The modules are listed alphabetically. You can see the POT (template file, all original strings but no translations yet) at the top of each module listing. Then the current translations are listed. Thus you can start with the POT, if there isn’t a translation for your language yet, or update the current file. (Making sure you co-ordinate this with the translation team for your language, so effort is not duplicated.) As the original documentation is updated, so is the POT, and so are the existing translations. Just like the application PO files listed under your language on the GNOME l10n status pages.

Older information

On the gnome-i18n mailing list Christian Rose says, “At the moment, we don’t translate documentation the same way we translate the user interfaces (i.e. with “po” files). However, we hope to do so at some point, since po files provide several essential advantages compared to maintaining translations of plain XML. One such advantage is that it divides documents into smaller pieces (messages), allowing you to see exactly what parts have an inconsistent translation and need updating.”

“For the moment, what you may want to do is to use the “xml2po” utility in the “gnome-doc-utils” package/module. This will allow you to transform the XML/DocBook source of a document into a pot file that you can translate and maintain. Also, it allows you to reverse the process and create a translated XML file out of the po file later on.”

Finding PO files

Technical notes on finding PO files via http://l10n.gnome.org/ from Simos Xenitellis on the translate-pootle list:

You can get .po files from the statistics pages. Have a look at http://l10n.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/index.html Click on individual language pages and they will lead you to the .po files. These files are updated daily, so the “resolution” of freshness is just one day (not bad).

FIXME The following script won’t work anymore. We use the following scripts while making a translation memory IN-A-GLANCE:

% wget -O desktop.html http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/el/desktop/index.html
% wget -O developer-libs.html http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/el/developer-libs/index.html
% grep 'el\.po' desktop.html developer-libs.html | awk -F\" '{print $6}' | sort | uniq |awk -F\/ '{print $4}' | awk '{printf "wget -O GNOME210-%s http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/PO/%s\n", $1, $1}' | sh

David Fraser has also created a script that pulls the files out of CVS after finding them on the l10n-status web page

#!/bin/bash
  lang=$1
  branch=2.10
  export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome
  if [[ $lang == "" ]]
   then
    echo syntax $0 lang
    exit
   fi
  [[ -d $lang ]] || mkdir $lang
  cd $lang
  [[:f_desktop.html]] && rm -f desktop.html
  [[:f_developer-libs.html]] && rm -f developer-libs.html
  wget -O desktop.html http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-$branch/$lang/desktop/index.html
  wget -O developer-libs.html http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-$branch/$lang/developer-libs/index.html
  pofiles=`grep ${lang}'\.po' desktop.html developer-libs.html | awk -F\" '{print $6}' | sort | uniq | awk -F\/ '{print $4}'`
  for pofile in ${pofiles}
   do
    basefile=`basename $pofile .${lang}.po`
    actualbranch=""
    for possiblebranch in HEAD gnome-${branch}
     do
      branchext=`echo $possiblebranch | sed 's/[.]/-/g'`
      isbranch=0
      echo $basefile | grep $branchext >/dev/null && isbranch=1
      if [[ $isbranch == 1 ]]
       then
        basefile=`basename $basefile .$branchext`
        actualbranch=$branchext
       fi
     done
    # this would get it straight off the web page:
    # wget -O ${pofile} http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-$branch/PO/${pofile}
    # this checks it out of CVS:
    if [[ $actualbranch == "" ]]
     then
      cvs -z3 co $basefile/po/$lang.po
     else
      cvs -z3 co -r $actualbranch $basefile/po/$lang.po

    fi
   done