Ubuntu Wiki

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to document the lifecycle of translations in Kubuntu since the import from upstream until they are shown to users.

Overview

• IMPORT: all KDE translations imported from upstream are contained in the kde-l10n-xx packages (one per language)

  • Package content: these packages contain:

    • Translations for the applications (PO files)

    • Translations for the applications' .desktop files (as PO files) - in KDE those translations are created separately from the application. For each KDE module, there is a desktop_<modulename>.po file containing all .desktop translations for all applications in the module.

    • The templates (POT files) for all of the above, created on build
    • entry.desktop files - note: what are these?
    • Translations for the documentation
    • Translations for man pages

    • Other translated media (audio, video, transcript scripts, etc.)

  • Package content imported into Launchpad: from the above, only the following will be stripped from the binary packages and imported into Launchpad:

    • Translations for the applications (PO files) and their templates (POT files)
    • Translations for the applications' .desktop files (PO files) and their templates (POT files)

• EXPORT: on the distro, KDE translations will be installed in the following way:

  • Language packs: in the KDE language packs: language-pack-kde-xx, one per language

    • Translations for the applications (MO files) at /usr/share/locale-langpack/<langcode>/LC_MESSAGES

    • Translations for the applications' .desktop files (MO files) at /usr/share/locale-langpack/<langcode>/LC_MESSAGES

    • entry.desktop files at at /usr/share/locale-langpack/<langcode>, copied verbatim from the kde-l10n-xx packages

  • Additional translations: in the kde-l10n-xx packages, one per language

    • These contain the documentation and additional translated media which cannot be imported into Launchpad, and will be 1:1 with upstream. They will be installed at locations such as /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/<langcode> or /usr/share/locale/<langcode>/LC_SCRIPTS

    • Those languages without upstream translations for these media will have empty packages, but nonetheless they will be installed

How are translations fetched from upstream

Applications, documentation

Desktop files

• Directly from upstream's SVN, from the stable branch

entries.desktop

• langpack-o-matic has a script, update-kde-tars which grabs the entries.desktop files from all the kde-l10n-xx packages and generates entries.desktop files for any language-pack-kde-xx which does not have a corresponding kde-l10n-xx

• These should then be included in language-pack-kde-xx but currently (2009-08-01) is broken

Import workflow for KDE core

• Upstream:

  • The upstream sources are internationalised with KDE functions for gettext, PO files are kept separate from the source code in SVN
  • All translations (PO files) are shipped in a separate tarball for each language (kde-l10n-xx)

• Packaging:

  • Those sources are packaged as .deb packages:

  • The source packages generate POT files on build (using extract-message.sh and the Message.sh script included in each package.)

  • The kde-l10n-xx sources, containing exclusively translations, are packaged

  • kde-l10n-xx packaging includes downloading the desktop_<package>.pot files for KDE's modules from SVN. It also downloads other desktop files as listed in /usr/lib/kubuntu-desktop-i18n/desktop-template-list

• Build:

  • The kde-l10n-xx binary packages, do _not_ generate POT files on build

• Launchpad import:

  • The application's POT files are put in the import queue upon upload of the application package to the archive
  • The PO files are put in the import queue upon upload of the kde-l10n-xx package to the archive

The main difference between GNOME/extragear/other and KDE4 core (as far as the import into Launchpad goes) is that the first ones generally have a single template (domain) per source package, whereas the latter have got many templates (domains) per source package.

• Issues:
  • In the past some upstream sources (e.g. KTorrent) did not ship with Messages.sh files which had to be added manually, new packagers should watch out for this.

  • The kde-l10n packages contain more translated content other than PO files (audio files, pictures, etc.). It should be investigated whether it is worth installing them by default (update: language-selector should already do this, unless it's hitting 450349).

  • Quassel and Arora are in main and use Qt's translation system and produce .qm files. As a result, these don't get in language packs at all. Qt translation import is not trivial, since Qt use their own XML-based format, which is supported by gettext (but reportedly always one step behind, which prevents both Kubuntu and upstream from using gettex).
  • kde-l10n-xx do generate desktop_kde-l10n-xx.pot files, these should be ignored (fixes to kubuntu.mk to stop them being generated welcome).

  • The generated .desktop templates are in the form desktop_<sourcepackage>.pot. The source package does not always match the template name used upstream so it needs to be overridden in the debian/rules file.

The kde-l10n packages and language packs

Language variants

• In Kubuntu, language variants are shipped in the same language pack as the main language code. That is, taking sr and sr@latin as an example, both the sr and the sr@latin translations will be shipped in the language-pack-kde-sr package.

• In Launchpad variants are not shown in the UI, but are imported and exported transparently.
• In KDE upstream, the variants can be found in two different places:

  • Application PO files: in the main language tarballs: in the variant subfolder (e.g. under sr@latin), in SVN: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/stable/l10n-kde4/sr/sr@latin

  • Desktop PO files: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/stable/l10n-kde4/sr@latin/messages/

The following language variants can be currently found in the KDE stable branch:

• be@latin
• ca@valencia
• sr@latin
• uz@cyrillic

In order to fetch the variant translations for Kubuntu:

• Application PO files: the translations in the language@variant subfolder in the upstream tarball should also be imported into Launchpad Translations.

• Desktop files: the scripts fetching the files for the main language code package (kde-l10n-xx) should look at the SVN location for the variant as well.

Kubuntu developer tools related to translations

• batl10n is a script that assists Kubuntu packagers with KDE updates. It mostly just walks through all kde-l10n tarballs, merges the packaging in and create ready-to-upload source packages (in the process it can also apply batch changes of course).

• KDE l10n orphans parser

CategoryTranslations