Introduction

This package contains a set of tools to help manage translations in Python software.

Babel extraction plugins

lingua contains two extraction plugins for Babel:

• lingua_python, which supports translation strings as used in Pyramid (via translationstring) and Zope2/ZTK (via zope.i18nmessageid).
• lingua_xml, which supports the i18n syntax as used by Chameleon and Zope PageTempaltes,

Detailed information on using Babel extraction plugins can be found in the Babel documentation.

Translating via spreadsheets

Not all translators are comfortable with using PO-editors such as Poedit or translation tools like Transifex. For them lingua has simple tools to convert PO-files to xls-files and back again. This also has another benefit: it is possible to include multiple languages in a single spreadsheet, which is helpful when translating to multiple similar languages at the same time (for example simplified and traditional chinese).

The format for spreadsheets is simple: the first column lists the canonical text, and all further columns contain a translation for the text, with the language code on the first row. Fuzzy translations are marked in italic.

Converting one or more PO-files to an xls file is done with the po-to-xls command:

po-to-xls -p nl nl.po texts.xls

This will create a new file texts.xls with the Dutch translations. The -p parameter can be given multiple times to include more languages:

po-to-xls -p zh_CN zh_CN.po -p zh_TW zh_TW.po -p nl nl.po texts.xls

This will generate a file with all simplified chinese, traditional chinese and Dutch translations.

Translations can be merged back from a spreadsheet into a PO-file using the xls-to-po command:

xls-to-po nl texts.xls nl.po

This will take the Dutch (nl) translations from texts.xls and use those to upgrade the nl.po file.

Sanity checking

Lingua includes a simple polint tool which performs a few basic checks on PO files. Currently implemented tests are:

• duplicated message ids (can also be checked with msgfmt). These should never happen and are usually a result of a bug in the message extraction logic.
• identical translations used for multiple canonical texts. This can happen for valid reasons, for example when the original text is not spelled consistently.

To check a po file simply run polint with the po file as argument:

polint nl.po

Translation:
    ${val} ist keine Zeichenkette
Used for 2 canonical texts:
1       ${val} is not a string
2       "${val}" is not a string