0aff7b7584
I have no idea if this is going to cause rendering problems, and it is fairly hard to check. So let's just merge this, and if it github markdown processor doesn't like it, revert.
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:
$ meson compile -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:
$ meson compile -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:
$ meson compile -C build/ systemd-gmo
The resulting files will be saved in the build/po/ directory.