Edgewall Software

Localization (L10N) of Trac

Trac uses Babel for localization. Trac trunk now contains the i18n framework and L10N files.

The preference panel for language works now (since r6732).

If you're only interested in using a localized version of Trac, then refer to the simpler 0.12/TracInstall instructions. The more complete installation instructions below are aimed at developers and translators.

Note: what developers and translators are respectively supposed to do is still being discussed - the following instructions describe what I've been doing for contributing to the french translations -- cboos.

Installation

Getting the Tool Chain

  1. Install Babel, trunk version Babel:r364 precisely for now.
    Read the detailed installation instructions for Babel. Chances are that once Babel 1.0 has been release, this will be the required version for Trac and the installation will be a simple easy_install by then. For now, please don't do that and use the version explicitly specified above.
  2. Likewise, install Genshi >= 0.5 (or trunk version >= r851).
  3. Get a svn checkout from the Trac trunk, e.g. svn checkout http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/trunk trac-0.12dev

Translation Workflow

  1. Run python setup.py extract_messages.
    This will generate the catalog template file: trac/locale/messages.pot. You won't need to edit that file manually.
  2. Run python setup.py update_catalog.
    This will regenerate the various string catalogs (trac/locale/*_*/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po), preserving the previously translated strings.
    Usually, you will be interested in just one locale, so you can provide the -l option to specify which catalog should be updated. For example:
    python setup.py update_catalog -l nl_NL.
  3. Now, open your favorite editor and add or modifiy translations for the extracted strings in the catalog for your language. See examples below.
  4. Once you're done, you should test your translations:
    • Run python setup.py update_catalog -l again, for normalizing the manual edits. For example:
      python setup.py update_catalog -l nl_NL.
      This step is also quite useful to spot the possible mistakes, like accidental change of msgid strings. Look for lines beginning with #~, they are indicative of such errors.
    • Run python setup.py compile_catalog -f.
      This will generate one compiled catalog (message.mo file) for each (or each specified) source catalog. You don't need to do anything with those files, they'll get installed automatically.
      You will most probably need to use the force option (-f) in order to compile catalogs marked "fuzzy".
      You can also use the -l option here to specify which specific locale has to be compiled.
    • Run python setup.py install for installing Trac and locale data, or you can use python setup.py develop once for all, if you want to be able to run Trac from your working copy.

Contributing

The various catalog files (messages.po) can be found in the repository under source:trunk/trac/locale. The messages.pot is the template file from which the various locale-specific files get created. If you need to create a catalog for a new locale (e.g. fr_CA), do: 

$ ./setup.py init_catalog -l fr_CA

TODO: add translation examples

Translation status

Repository version: r7143.

Language Translated Untranslated Fuzzy Obsolete
cs_CZ 459 238 84 0
cy_GB 90 607 13 0
de_DE 678 19 1 0
el_GR 1 696 1 0
en_US 0 697 0 0
es_AR 668 29 47 0
es_ES 272 425 43 0
et_EE        
fa_IR 666 31 54 0
fi_FI 0 697 0 0
fr_FR 689 17 69 0
hu_HU 50 647 12 0
it_IT 697 0 0 0
ja_JP 594 103 2 0
ko_KR 659 47 0 0
lv_LV 16 681 3 0
nb_NO 191 506 0 0
nl_NL 232 464 41 0
pl_PL 36 661 34 0
pt_BR 475 222 18 0
pt_PT 349 348 3 0
ru_RU 543 154 127 0
sv_SE 148 549 50 0
th_TH 3 694 0 0
tr_TR 40 657 12 0
vi_VN 20 677 18 0
zh_CN 697 0 3 0
zh_TW 41 656 13 0

Translation coordination

For the various languages there are already various tickets logged in which the work on them is tracked:

#5469
Translation of Trac to Spanish/Español [es_ES]
#5470
Translation of Trac to Portuguese/Português [pt_PT]
#5471
Translation of Trac to Japanese/日本語 [ja_JP]
#5472
Translation of Trac to Chinese/中文 [zh_CN]
#5473
Translation of Trac to Dutch/Nederlands [nl_NL]
#5474
Translation of Trac to French/Français [fr_FR]
#5475
Translation of Trac to German/Deutsch [de_DE]
#5476
Translation of Trac to Portuguese/Português [pt_BR]
#5477
Translation of Trac to Korean/한국어 [ko_KR]
#5478
Translation of Trac to Russian/Русский [ru_RU]
#5479
Translation of Trac to Latvian/Latviešu [lv_LV]
#5480
Translation of Trac to Polish/Polski [pl_PL]
#5481
Translation of Trac to Greek/Ελληνικά [el_GR]
#5482
Translation of Trac to Traditional Chinese/正體中文 [zh_TW]
#5486
Translation of Trac to Hungarian/Magyar [hu_HU]
#5487
Translation of Trac to Swedish/Svenska [sv_SE]
#5488
Translation of Trac to Turkish/Türkçe [tr_TR]
#5489
Translation of Trac to Italian/Italiano [it_IT]
#5592
Translation of Trac to Czech/Česky [cs_CZ]
#6382
Translation of Trac to Farsi/پارسی [fa_IR]
#6385
Translation of Trac to Welsh/Cymraeg [cy_GB]
#6430
Translation of Trac to Thai/ไทย [th_TH]
#6629
Translation of Trac to Vietnamese/Tiếng Việt [vi_VN]
#7177
Translation of Trac to Norwegian/bokmål [nb_NO]
#7178
Translation of Trac to Finnish/suomi [fi_FI]
#7186
Translation of Trac to Argentinian Spanish/español de Argentina [es_AR]
#7417
Translation of Trac to English [en_GB]
#7487
Translation of Trac into Slovene/Slovensko [sl_SI]
#7578
Translation of Trac to Estonian/eesti [et_EE]

This is a way by which translators for the same language can coordinate their work.

Terms (Definitions)

Consistent and careful translation of terms like timeline, ticket, report is very important. These terms are used everywhere and must be easy to remember and comfortable to use.

The way to make up good translations of important terms is to discuss them before using everywhere. The easiest way to accomplish it is to set up wiki pages for different languages.

Look also at the various term definition pages:

Open issues

  • i18n infrastructure for Trac plugins
  • translation of wiki pages (#1513) and help pages (TracDev/Proposals/NewHelp)
  • translation of text within Javascript source code

    #2182
    trac.ini setting for date and time formats
    #3919
    Notifications use field name instead of label for custom fields
    #4636
    Component field sort order doesn't use locale
    #6234
    translation support for the workflow
    #6387
    docs about translation
    #7353
    Translation of Trac to Catalan/Català [ca_ES]

The following is historical information

Wiki

  • We need an easy way to translate wiki pages. It should help and encourage people to translate a particular page into their native language.
  • It should be possible to quickly switch between different versions of the same page. May be we should give the possibility to compare different versions on one page.
  • We have to give the way to set the prefered language.
  • There should be a way to quickly check if the translation is current with respect to the original version. The original version may not always be in english, so there should be a way to know which one is the original.

Interface

For the project to be localized, the actual interface would have to be translated as well. How difficult would it be to translate the interface to say, Japanese?

If possible it should be a user preference, which may require some additional changes. Ideally a single Trac site should be able to serve users in many countries. The interface should be translated and there should be support for translation of custom fields and plug-in's as well as wiki pages.

If possible it may be best if one could come up with an array of the most important terms derived from the wiki pages described below to be used in auto translating the interface.

Other Implementations

How does other software (especially wiki-software) deal with the problem of L10N? This section is devoted to describing and linking existing solutions.

Wikipedia

The famous Wikipedia has a huge collection of translations. How do they do it?

Drupal

The Drupal CMS http://www.drupal.org has a nice translation unit for its backend. It uses .po-files that can be edit and translated with the poedit http://www.poedit.net/ software.

Zope

Zope also uses gettext-catalogs for translation. All basic functionality is provided by the packages zope.i18n (language-negotiation, formats for time, date, translation of msgids with languagefallback) and zope.i18nmessageid. It also has code to use LDML-files (Locale Data Markup Language).

The template-language provides some special attibutes (e.g. i18n:domain, i18n:translate). Translation in python-code works like this (from http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/trunk/src/zope/i18nmessageid/messages.txt?rev=65911&view=log) 

In this example, we create a message factory and assign it to _.  By
convention, we use _ as the name of our factory to be compatible with
translatable string extraction tools such as xgettext.  We then call _
with a string that needs to be translatable:

  >>> from zope.i18nmessageid import MessageFactory, Message
  >>> _ = MessageFactory("futurama")
  >>> robot = _(u"robot-message", u"${name} is a robot.")

robot looks like a unicode-string and will be translated depending on the negotiated language and the available message-catalogs.

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