Translating MoinMoin

If your language already exists

To find out if someone has already started a translation of moin2 into your language; check the folder moin/translations in the source tree. If there is a folder with your language code (locale) [1], you can start with the steps below. If not, please take a look at If your language doesn’t exist yet.

  1. Make sure you have the latest version of the source tree (git). You will also need to have python installed, with setuptools and babel packages.

  2. Go to the top directory and execute:

    python setup.py update_catalog -l <locale>

    where locale is the short language descriptor of your desired language. It should be the name of a folder in MoinMoin/translations. For German it is “de”.

  3. Open the file src/moin/translations/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po and do your translation. A short explanation of this process follows:

    • Find an entry with an empty or bad translated text, the text after msgstr, and apply your changes.

    • never edit the ‘msgid’ string, and only edit the ‘msgstr’ field

    • Variables like %(name)x, where x is any character, must be kept as they are. They must occur in the translated text.

    • For better readability you can divide a text-string over more than one line, by “surrounding” each line with double quotes (“). It is a usual convention to have a maximal line-length of 80 characters.

    • Comments starting with “#.”, “#:” or “#|” are auto-generated and should not be modified.

    • Comments starting with “# ” (# and at least one whitespace) are translator-comments. You can modify/add them. They have to be placed right before the auto-generated comments.

    • Comments starting with “#,” and separated with “,” are flags. They can be auto-generated, but they can also be set by the translator.

      An important flag is “fuzzy”. It shows that the msgstr string might not be a correct translation. Only the translator can judge if the translation requires further modification, or is acceptable as it is. Once satisfied with the translation, he/she then removes this fuzzy attribute.

  4. Save the messages.po file and execute:

    python setup.py compile_catalog -l <locale>

Guidelines for translators

In languages where a separate polite form of address exists, like the German “Sie”/”Du”, always use the polite form.

If your language doesn’t exist yet

You want to translate moin2 to your language? Great! Get in contact with the developers, but …

Note

please don’t ask us whether we want other translations, we currently do not want them, it is still too early. We just want 1 translation and it needs to be German because that is what many moin developers can maintain themselves.

  1. Initialize a new catalog:

    python setup.py init_catalog -l <locale>

  2. Adjust the src/moin/translations/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po.

    Follow the instructions in First steps with a new *.po file and then you can remove the fuzzy flag, which prevents the file from being compiled.

  3. Follow the steps above, see If your language already exists.

First steps with a new *.po file

A newly created translation needs a few initial preparations:

  • replace “PROJECT” with “MoinMoin 2”

  • replace “FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>” with the appropriate information about yourself

  • replace “PROJECT VERSION” in the head msgstr with “MoinMoin 2.0” or newer if neccessary

  • change the value of “Last-Translator” to your data

  • change the value of “Language-Team” to “Language <moin-user@lists.sourceforge.net>”

Note for developers

Since we support newstyle gettext there is no need to use the format()-Method in internationalized Strings anymore. An example will explain this: instead of _('Hello %(name)s!') % dict(name='World') you can just write _('Hello %(name)s!', name='World').

If the translatable string contains a variable plural, that means the string contains an object which you don’t know the exact quantity of, then you will have to use ngettext(). Note that this is not only needed for the decision between one and more objects, because other languages have other and more difficult plurals than English. The usage is ngettext(singular, plural, num, **variables). **variables enables you to use the newstyle form as explained above.

For example: ngettext("%(number)d file removed from %(directory)s", "%(number)d files removed from %(directory)s", num=n, number=n, directory=directory)

n has to appear twice because the first gives ngettext() information about the exact number and the second is the variable for the format string replacement.

If you made changes to any gettext() string, please update the .pot file using:

python setup.py extract_messages

Because this sometimes creates large diffs, just because of a change in line numbers, you can of course use this command sparingly. Another option for better readability is to do a separate commit for this.