Guide to Translating Subversion

If you are contributing translations to the Subversion project, please read this first. For general project guidelines, see the Hacker's Guide to Subversion.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Subversion uses gettext for its translation. Gettext uses .po files to store translation information; the existing ones are kept in the subversion/po directory of the repository. Note that we deliberately do not require GNU gettext.

Please take some time to go through this document as well as the Hacker's Guide to Subversion.

Software version requirements

The Makefile build targets locale-gnu-* (used to maintain po files) require GNU gettext 0.13 or newer. Note that this is not a requirement for those wanting to compile the *.po files into *.mo's.

Starting a new translation

Before starting a new translation please contact the subversion development mailing list to make sure you are not duplicating efforts. Also please note that the project has a strong preference for translations which are maintained by more than one person: mailing the lists with your intentions might help you find supporters.

After that, you should perform the following steps:

Unix (GNU gettext)

  1. check out Subversion (see INSTALL for more information)
  2. run ./autogen.sh
  3. run ./configure
  4. run make locale-gnu-pot
    This step is currently only supported for GNU gettext Makefile based systems
  5. run msginit --locale LOCALE -o LOCALE.po in the subversion/po directory of your working copy. LOCALE is the ll[_LL] language and country code used to identify your locale.

Steps (2) and (3) generate a Makefile; step (4) generates subversion/po/subversion.pot

The Subversion project has a policy not to put names in its files, so please apply the two changes described below.

The header in the newly generated .po file looks like this:

  # SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
  # Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
  # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
  # FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.

Please replace that block with the following text:

  # <Your language> translation for subversion package
  #    Licensed to the Subversion Corporation (SVN Corp.) under one
  #    or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
  #    distributed with this work for additional information
  #    regarding copyright ownership.  The SVN Corp. licenses this file
  #    to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
  #    "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
  #    with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
  #
  #      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
  #
  #    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
  #    software distributed under the License is distributed on an
  #    "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
  #    KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
  #    specific language governing permissions and limitations
  #    under the License.

The first translation block in the .po file contains two lines like these:

  "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
  "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"

Please replace those with these two lines:

  "Last-Translator: Subversion Developers <dev@subversion.tigris.org>\n"
  "Language-Team: YOUR LANGUAGE <dev@subversion.tigris.org>\n"

Unix (non-GNU gettext)

To be documented

Windows

See issue #1977.

Verifying your po file

Before submitting to the mailing list or committing to the repository, please make sure your po file 'compiles'. You can do this with these steps (on Makefile based systems):

  1. run ./autogen.sh
  2. run ./configure (with the appropriate arguments)
  3. run make locale

The autogen.sh step is important, since it adds new po files as dependencies of the 'locale' build target. Note however that steps 1 and 2 are only needed once after you have added a new translation.

Submitting your po file

Please don't mail large po files to the mailing lists. There are many subscribers on dev@subversion.tigris.org who are on slow links and do not want to receive a large file by email. Instead, place the po file somewhere on the Internet for download, and just post the URL. If you do not have a site available, please ask on dev@ and someone will help you find a location.

Of course, if you have commit access to the Subversion repository, you can just commit the po file there, assuming all other requirements have been satisfied.

Updating existing po files

The Makefile based part of the build system contains a make target to facilitate maintenance of existing po files. To update po files on systems with GNU gettext run

    make locale-gnu-po-update

To only update a particular language, you may use

    make locale-gnu-po-update PO=ll

where ll is the name of the po file without the extension (i.e. PO=sv).

It is recommended that the .po update is done by using two commits; one after the "make locale-gnu-po-update", and one after the translation is done. This has two advantages:

Maintenance on branches

Editing po files in trunk is pretty straightforward, but gets a bit more complicated when those changes are going to be transferred to a release branch. Project policy is to make no direct changes on release branches, everything that is committed to the branch should be merged from trunk. This also applies to po files. Using svn merge to do the job can lead to conflicts and fuzzy messages due to the changes in line numbers and string formatting done by gettext.

The scheme below eliminates any complexity which exists when using svn merge to do branch updates. The following rules apply:

The above list is a complete enumeration of all operations allowed on po files on branches.

Merging messages from trunk revision X of YY.po to your branch working copy can be done with this command:

  svn cat -r X http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/subversion/po/YY.po | \
    po-merge.py YY.po

Requirements for po and mo files

On some gettext implementations we have to ensure that the mo files—whether obtained through the project or created locally—are encoded using UTF-8. This requirement stem from the fact that Subversion uses UTF-8 internally, some implementations translate to the active locale and the fact that bind_textdomain_codeset() is not portable across implementations.

To satisfy this requirement po files are required to be UTF-8 encoded. If the gettext implementation on the target system doesn't support bind_textdomain_codeset(), the build system will ensure that the mo file is in UTF-8 by removing the Content-Type header from the po file header. Note that some msgfmt utilities dislike the absence of the charset designator and will generate warnings along the lines of "Won't be able to do character set conversion" because of it. You can safely ignore these warnings.

Conventions for the empty string msgid section

Some gettext implementations use a section with a msgid "" (empty string) to keep administrative data. One of the headers suggested is the 'Last-Translator:' field. Because the Subversion project has a policy not to name contributors in specific files, but give credit in the repository log messages, you are required not to put your name in this field.

Since some tools require this field to consider the po file valid (i.e. Emacs PO Mode), you can put "dev@subversion.tigris.org" into this field.

Translation teams

The GNU translation project (http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~gnutra/po/HTML/) attempts to organise translation attempts and get translators for various packages. Some teams have guidelines to stimulate consistency across packages.

Single versus double quotes

The project has standardised the use of quotes. Some translation teams have done the same. If there is no translation team for your locale or they did not standardise quoting, please follow the project guidelines per www/hacking.html. If they did: follow them :-)

Error message conventions

Since translators will generally see all error messages in the code, it's important to know that there is a special section in the Hacker's Guide about this category of strings. Here the same applies as does for the quotes: Adhere to them on all points for which there is no explicit policy set out by the translation team for your language.