poconflicts

poconflicts takes a PO file and creates an set of output PO files that contain messages that conflict. During any translation project that involves a large amount of work or a number of translators you will see message conflicts. A conflict is where the same English message has been translated differently (in some languages this may have been intentional). Conflicts occur due to different translation style or a shift in translations as the translators or project mature.

poconflicts allows you to quickly identify these problem messages, investigate and correct them. To merge the files back, they have to be restructured into the correct directory structure using porestructure in order to enable merging using pomerge.

Usage

poconflicts [options] <po> <conflicts>

Where:

<po>	is a directory of existing PO files or an individual PO file
<conflicts>	is a directory containing one PO file for each conflict

Options:

--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 po format

-x EXCLUDE, --exclude=EXCLUDE

exclude names matching EXCLUDE from input paths

-o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT

write to OUTPUT in po format

-I, --ignore-case

ignore case distinctions

-v, --invert

invert the conflicts thus extracting conflicting destination words

--accelerator=ACCELERATORS

ignores the given accelerator characters when matching

Examples

Here are some examples that demonstrate the usefulness of poconflict

poconflicts --accelerator=~ -I xhosa conflicts

This extracts messages from the PO files in the xhosa directory and places a new PO file for each identified conflict in conflicts. We are working with OpenOffice files and we therefore use the tilde (~) as the accelerator marker (with this set F~ile is considered the same as ~File). We are also ignoring the case of the message using -I (thus File is considered the same as file or FILE)

Another useful option is to look at the inverted conflicts. This will detect target words that have been used to translate different source words.

poconflicts --accelerator=~ -I -v xhosa conflicts

Now in the conflicts directory we will find PO files based on the Xhosa word. We can now check where a Xhosa word has been used for different source or English words. Often there is no problem but you might find cases where the same Xhosa word was used for Delete and Cancel – clearly a usability issue.

The translator makes the needed corrections to the files and then we can proceed to merge the results back into the PO files. Unchanged entries can be removed.

Now restructure the files to resemble the original directory structure using porestructure:

porestructure -i conflicts -o conflicts_tree

Now merge the changes back using pomerge:

pomerge -t xhosa -i conflicts_tree -o xhosa

This takes the corrected files from conflicts_tree and merge them into the files in xhosa using the same files as templates.