po/README

   1 Core GIT Translations
   2 =====================
   3
   4 This directory holds the translations for the core of Git. This document
   5 describes how you can contribute to the effort of enhancing the language
   6 coverage and maintaining the translation.
   7
   8 The localization (l10n) coordinator, Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com>,
   9 coordinates our localization effort in the l10 coordinator repository:
  10
  11         https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/
  12
  13 The two character language translation codes are defined by ISO_639-1, as
  14 stated in the gettext(1) full manual, appendix A.1, Usual Language Codes.
  15
  16
  17 Contributing to an existing translation
  18 ---------------------------------------
  19 As a contributor for a language XX, you should first check TEAMS file in
  20 this directory to see whether a dedicated repository for your language XX
  21 exists. Fork the dedicated repository and start to work if it exists.
  22
  23 Sometime, contributors may find that the translations of their Git
  24 distributions are quite different with the translations of the
  25 corresponding version from Git official. This is because some Git
  26 distributions (such as from Ubuntu, etc.) have their own l10n workflow.
  27 For this case, wrong translations should be reported and fixed through
  28 their workflows.
  29
  30
  31 Creating a new language translation
  32 -----------------------------------
  33 If you are the first contributor for the language XX, please fork this
  34 repository, prepare and/or update the translated message file po/XX.po
  35 (described later), and ask the l10n coordinator to pull your work.
  36
  37 If there are multiple contributors for the same language, please first
  38 coordinate among yourselves and nominate the team leader for your
  39 language, so that the l10n coordinator only needs to interact with one
  40 person per language.
  41
  42
  43 Translation Process Flow
  44 ------------------------
  45 The overall data-flow looks like this:
  46
  47     +-------------------+            +------------------+
  48     | Git source code   | ---(1)---> | L10n coordinator |
  49     | repository        | <---(4)--- | repository       |
  50     +-------------------+            +------------------+
  51                                           |      ^
  52                                          (2)    (3)
  53                                           V      |
  54                                      +------------------+
  55                                      | Language Team XX |
  56                                      +------------------+
  57
  58  * Translatable strings are marked in the source file.
  59  * L10n coordinator pulls from the source (1)
  60  * L10n coordinator updates the message template po/git.pot
  61  * Language team pulls from L10n coordinator (2)
  62  * Language team updates the message file po/XX.po
  63  * L10n coordinator pulls from Language team (3)
  64  * L10n coordinator asks the result to be pulled (4).
  65
  66
  67 Maintaining the po/git.pot file
  68 -------------------------------
  69
  70 (This is done by the l10n coordinator).
  71
  72 The po/git.pot file contains a message catalog extracted from Git's
  73 sources. The l10n coordinator maintains it by adding new translations with
  74 msginit(1), or update existing ones with msgmerge(1).  In order to update
  75 the Git sources to extract the messages from, the l10n coordinator is
  76 expected to pull from the main git repository at strategic point in
  77 history (e.g. when a major release and release candidates are tagged),
  78 and then run "make pot" at the top-level directory.
  79
  80 Language contributors use this file to prepare translations for their
  81 language, but they are not expected to modify it.
  82
  83
  84 Initializing a XX.po file
  85 -------------------------
  86
  87 (This is done by the language teams).
  88
  89 If your language XX does not have translated message file po/XX.po yet,
  90 you add a translation for the first time by running:
  91
  92     msginit --locale=XX
  93
  94 in the po/ directory, where XX is the locale, e.g. "de", "is", "pt_BR",
  95 "zh_CN", etc.
  96
  97 Then edit the automatically generated copyright info in your new XX.po
  98 to be correct, e.g. for Icelandic:
  99
 100     @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 101     -# Icelandic translations for PACKAGE package.
 102     -# Copyright (C) 2010 THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
 103     -# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
 104     +# Icelandic translations for Git.
 105     +# Copyright (C) 2010 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
 106     +# This file is distributed under the same license as the Git package.
 107      # Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>, 2010.
 108
 109 And change references to PACKAGE VERSION in the PO Header Entry to
 110 just "Git":
 111
 112     perl -pi -e 's/(?<="Project-Id-Version: )PACKAGE VERSION/Git/' XX.po
 113
 114 Once you are done testing the translation (see below), commit the result
 115 and ask the l10n coordinator to pull from you.
 116
 117
 118 Updating a XX.po file
 119 ---------------------
 120
 121 (This is done by the language teams).
 122
 123 If you are replacing translation strings in an existing XX.po file to
 124 improve the translation, just edit the file.
 125
 126 If there's an existing XX.po file for your language, but the repository
 127 of the l10n coordinator has newer po/git.pot file, you would need to first
 128 pull from the l10n coordinator (see the beginning of this document for its
 129 URL), and then update the existing translation by running:
 130
 131     msgmerge --add-location --backup=off -U XX.po git.pot
 132
 133 in the po/ directory, where XX.po is the file you want to update.
 134
 135 Once you are done testing the translation (see below), commit the result
 136 and ask the l10n coordinator to pull from you.
 137
 138
 139 Testing your changes
 140 --------------------
 141
 142 (This is done by the language teams, after creating or updating XX.po file).
 143
 144 Before you submit your changes go back to the top-level and do:
 145
 146     make
 147
 148 On systems with GNU gettext (i.e. not Solaris) this will compile your
 149 changed PO file with `msgfmt --check`, the --check option flags many
 150 common errors, e.g. missing printf format strings, or translated
 151 messages that deviate from the originals in whether they begin/end
 152 with a newline or not.
 153
 154
 155 Marking strings for translation
 156 -------------------------------
 157
 158 (This is done by the core developers).
 159
 160 Before strings can be translated they first have to be marked for
 161 translation.
 162
 163 Git uses an internationalization interface that wraps the system's
 164 gettext library, so most of the advice in your gettext documentation
 165 (on GNU systems `info gettext` in a terminal) applies.
 166
 167 General advice:
 168
 169  - Don't mark everything for translation, only strings which will be
 170    read by humans (the porcelain interface) should be translated.
 171
 172    The output from Git's plumbing utilities will primarily be read by
 173    programs and would break scripts under non-C locales if it was
 174    translated. Plumbing strings should not be translated, since
 175    they're part of Git's API.
 176
 177  - Adjust the strings so that they're easy to translate. Most of the
 178    advice in `info '(gettext)Preparing Strings'` applies here.
 179
 180  - If something is unclear or ambiguous you can use a "TRANSLATORS"
 181    comment to tell the translators what to make of it. These will be
 182    extracted by xgettext(1) and put in the po/*.po files, e.g. from
 183    git-am.sh:
 184
 185        # TRANSLATORS: Make sure to include [y], [n], [e], [v] and [a]
 186        # in your translation. The program will only accept English
 187        # input at this point.
 188        gettext "Apply? [y]es/[n]o/[e]dit/[v]iew patch/[a]ccept all "
 189
 190    Or in C, from builtin/revert.c:
 191
 192        /* TRANSLATORS: %s will be "revert" or "cherry-pick" */
 193        die(_("%s: Unable to write new index file"), action_name(opts));
 194
 195 We provide wrappers for C, Shell and Perl programs. Here's how they're
 196 used:
 197
 198 C:
 199
 200  - Include builtin.h at the top, it'll pull in gettext.h, which
 201    defines the gettext interface. Consult with the list if you need to
 202    use gettext.h directly.
 203
 204  - The C interface is a subset of the normal GNU gettext
 205    interface. We currently export these functions:
 206
 207    - _()
 208
 209     Mark and translate a string. E.g.:
 210
 211         printf(_("HEAD is now at %s"), hex);
 212
 213    - Q_()
 214
 215     Mark and translate a plural string. E.g.:
 216
 217         printf(Q_("%d commit", "%d commits", number_of_commits));
 218
 219     This is just a wrapper for the ngettext() function.
 220
 221    - N_()
 222
 223     A no-op pass-through macro for marking strings inside static
 224     initializations, e.g.:
 225
 226         static const char *reset_type_names[] = {
 227             N_("mixed"), N_("soft"), N_("hard"), N_("merge"), N_("keep"), NULL
 228         };
 229
 230     And then, later:
 231
 232         die(_("%s reset is not allowed in a bare repository"),
 233                _(reset_type_names[reset_type]));
 234
 235     Here _() couldn't have statically determined what the translation
 236     string will be, but since it was already marked for translation
 237     with N_() the look-up in the message catalog will succeed.
 238
 239 Shell:
 240
 241  - The Git gettext shell interface is just a wrapper for
 242    gettext.sh. Import it right after git-sh-setup like this:
 243
 244        . git-sh-setup
 245        . git-sh-i18n
 246
 247    And then use the gettext or eval_gettext functions:
 248
 249        # For constant interface messages:
 250        gettext "A message for the user"; echo
 251
 252        # To interpolate variables:
 253        details="oh noes"
 254        eval_gettext "An error occurred: \$details"; echo
 255
 256    In addition we have wrappers for messages that end with a trailing
 257    newline. I.e. you could write the above as:
 258
 259        # For constant interface messages:
 260        gettextln "A message for the user"
 261
 262        # To interpolate variables:
 263        details="oh noes"
 264        eval_gettextln "An error occurred: \$details"
 265
 266    More documentation about the interface is available in the GNU info
 267    page: `info '(gettext)sh'`. Looking at git-am.sh (the first shell
 268    command to be translated) for examples is also useful:
 269
 270        git log --reverse -p --grep=i18n git-am.sh
 271
 272 Perl:
 273
 274  - The Git::I18N module provides a limited subset of the
 275    Locale::Messages functionality, e.g.:
 276
 277        use Git::I18N;
 278        print __("Welcome to Git!\n");
 279        printf __("The following error occurred: %s\n"), $error;
 280
 281    Run `perldoc perl/Git/I18N.pm` for more info.
 282
 283
 284 Testing marked strings
 285 ----------------------
 286
 287 Even if you've correctly marked porcelain strings for translation
 288 something in the test suite might still depend on the US English
 289 version of the strings, e.g. to grep some error message or other
 290 output.
 291
 292 To smoke out issues like these, Git tested with a translation mode that
 293 emits gibberish on every call to gettext. To use it run the test suite
 294 with it, e.g.:
 295
 296     cd t && GIT_TEST_GETTEXT_POISON=true prove -j 9 ./t[0-9]*.sh
 297
 298 If tests break with it you should inspect them manually and see if
 299 what you're translating is sane, i.e. that you're not translating
 300 plumbing output.
 301
 302 If not you should replace calls to grep with test_i18ngrep, or
 303 test_cmp calls with test_i18ncmp. If that's not enough you can skip
 304 the whole test by making it depend on the C_LOCALE_OUTPUT
 305 prerequisite. See existing test files with this prerequisite for
 306 examples.