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mirror of https://github.com/systemd/systemd-stable.git synced 2025-03-15 18:50:12 +03:00
systemd-stable/docs/TRANSLATORS.md
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 224de3b487 Revert "docs: use collections to structure the data"
This reverts commit 5e8ff010a1436d33bbf3c108335af6e0b4ff7a2a.

This broke all the URLs, we can't have that. (And actually, we probably don't
_want_ to make the change either. It's nicer to have all the pages in one
directory, so one doesn't have to figure out to which collection the page
belongs.)

(cherry picked from commit 8e3fee33afed8cb6a0945288f4773363a4d68912)
2024-02-26 13:21:18 +00:00

2.4 KiB

title category layout SPDX-License-Identifier
Notes for Translators Contributing default LGPL-2.1-or-later

Notes for Translators

systemd depends on the gettext package for multilingual support.

You'll find the i18n files in the po/ directory.

The build system (meson/ninja) can be used to generate a template (*.pot), which can be used to create new translations.

It can also merge the template into the existing translations (*.po), to pick up new strings in need of translation.

Finally, it is able to compile the translations (to *.gmo files), so that they can be used by systemd software. (This step is also useful to confirm the syntax of the *.po files is correct.)

Creating a New Translation

To create a translation to a language not yet available, start by creating the initial template:

$ ninja -C build/ systemd-pot

This will generate file po/systemd.pot in the source tree.

Then simply copy it to a new ${lang_code}.po file, where ${lang_code} is the two-letter code for a language (possibly followed by a two-letter uppercase country code), according to the ISO 639 standard.

In short:

$ cp po/systemd.pot po/${lang_code}.po

Then edit the new po/${lang_code}.po file (for example, using the poedit GUI editor.)

Updating an Existing Translation

Start by updating the *.po files from the latest template:

$ ninja -C build/ systemd-update-po

This will touch all the *.po files, so you'll want to pay attention when creating a git commit from this change, to only include the one translation you're actually updating.

Edit the *.po file, looking for empty translations and translations marked as "fuzzy" (which means the merger found a similar message that needs to be reviewed as it's expected not to match exactly.)

You can use any text editor to update the *.po files, but a good choice is the poedit editor, a graphical application specifically designed for this purpose.

Once you're done, create a git commit for the update of the po/*.po file you touched. Remember to undo the changes to the other *.po files (for instance, using git checkout -- po/ after you commit the changes you do want to keep.)

Recompiling Translations

You can recompile the *.po files using the following command:

$ ninja -C build/ systemd-gmo

The resulting files will be saved in the build/po/ directory.