moz2po¶

moz2po converts Mozilla files to PO files. It wraps converters that handle .properties, .dtd and some strange Mozilla files. The tool can work with files from Mozilla’s Mercurial repository. The tools thus provides a complete roundtrip for Mozilla localisation using PO files and PO editors.

Note

This page should only be used as a reference to the command-line options for moz2po and po2moz.

Usage¶

moz2po [options] <dir> <po>
po2moz [options] <po> <dir>

Where:

<dir>	is a directory containing valid Mozilla files
<po>	is a directory of PO or POT files

Options (moz2po):

--version: show program’s version number and exit
-h, --help: show this help message and exit
--manpage: output a manpage based on the help
--progress=PROGRESS: show progress as: dots, none, bar, names, verbose
--errorlevel=ERRORLEVEL: show errorlevel as: none, message, exception, traceback
-i INPUT, --input=INPUT: read from INPUT in inc, it, *, dtd, properties formats
-x EXCLUDE, --exclude=EXCLUDE: exclude names matching EXCLUDE from input paths
-o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT: write to OUTPUT in it.po, it.pot, manifest, xhtml.po, xhtml.pot, ini.po, ini.pot, rdf, js, *, html.po, html.pot, inc.po, inc.pot, dtd.po, dtd.pot, properties.po, properties.pot formats
-t TEMPLATE, --template=TEMPLATE: read from TEMPLATE in it, *, properties, dtd, inc formats
-S, --timestamp: skip conversion if the output file has newer timestamp
-P, --pot: output PO Templates (.pot) rather than PO files (.po)
--duplicates=DUPLICATESTYLE: what to do with duplicate strings (identical source text): merge, msgctxt (default: ‘msgctxt’)

Options (po2moz):

--version: show program’s version number and exit
-h, --help: show this help message and exit
--manpage: output a manpage based on the help
--progress=PROGRESS: show progress as: dots, none, bar, names, verbose
--errorlevel=ERRORLEVEL: show errorlevel as: none, message, exception, traceback
-i INPUT, --input=INPUT: read from INPUT in dtd.po, dtd.pot, ini.po, ini.pot, inc.po, inc.pot, manifest, it.po, it.pot, *, html.po, html.pot, js, rdf, properties.po, properties.pot, xhtml.po, xhtml.pot formats
-x EXCLUDE, --exclude=EXCLUDE: exclude names matching EXCLUDE from input paths
-o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT: write to OUTPUT in dtd, *, inc, it, properties formats
-t TEMPLATE, --template=TEMPLATE: read from TEMPLATE in dtd, *, inc, it, properties formats
-S, --timestamp: skip conversion if the output file has newer timestamp
-l LOCALE, --locale=LOCALE: set output locale (required as this sets the directory names)
--removeuntranslated: remove untranslated strings from output
--threshold=PERCENT: only convert files where the translation completion is above PERCENT
--fuzzy: use translations marked fuzzy
--nofuzzy: don’t use translations marked fuzzy (default)

Examples¶

Creating POT files¶

After extracting the en-US l10n files, you can run the following command:

moz2po -P l10n/en-US pot

This creates a set of POT (-P) files in the pot directory from the Mozilla files in l10n/en-US for use as PO Templates.

If you want to create a set of POT files with another base language try the following:

moz2po -P l10n/fr-FR fr-pot

This will create a set of POT files in fr-pot that have French as your source language.

Creating PO files from existing non-PO translations¶

If you have existing translations (Mozilla related or other Babelzilla files) and you wish to convert them to PO for future translation then the following generic instructions will work:

moz2po -t en-US af-ZA af-ZA_pofiles

This will combine the untranslated template en-US files from en-US combine them with your existing translations in af-ZA and output PO files to af-ZA_pofiles.

moz2po -t l10n/fr l10n/xh po/xh

For those who are not English fluent you can do the same with another languages. In this case msgid will contain the French text from l10n/fr. This is useful for translating where the translators other languages is not English but French, Spanish or Portuguese. Please make sure that the source languages i.e. the msgid language is fully translated as against en-US.

Creating Mercurial ready translations¶

po2moz -t l10n/en-US po/xh l10n/xh

Create Mozilla files using the templates files in l10n/en-US (see above for how to create them) with PO translations in po/xh and output them to l10n/xh. The files now in l10n/xh are ready for submission to Mozilla and can be used to build a language pack or translated version of Mozilla.

Issues¶

You can perform the bulk of your work (99%) with moz2po.

Localisation of XHTML is not yet perfect, you might want to work with the files directly.

Issue 203 tracks the outstanding features which would allow complete localisation of Mozilla including; all help, start pages, rdf files, etc. It also tracks some bugs.

Accesskeys don’t yet work in .properties files and in several cases where the Mozilla .dtd files don’t follow the normal conventions, for example in security/manager/chrome/pippki/pref-ssl.dtd.po. You might also want to check the files mentioned in this Mozilla bug 329444 where mistakes in the DTD-definitions cause problems in the matching of accelerators with the text.

You might want to give special attention to the following files since it contains customisations that are not really translations.

mail/chrome/messenger/downloadheaders.dtd.po
toolkit/chrome/global/intl.properties.po

Also, all width, height and size specifications need to be edited with feedback from testing the translated interfaces.

There are some constructed strings in the Mozilla code which we can’t do much about. Take good care to read the localisation notes. For an example, see mail/chrome/messenger/downloadheaders.dtd.po. In that specific file, the localisation note from the DTD file is lost, so take good care of those.

The file extension of the original Mozilla file is required to tell the Toolkit how to do the conversion. Therefore, a file like foo.dtd must be named foo.dtd.po in order to po2moz to recognise it as a DTD file.