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Overview

While development usually takes place in English, free software is used by people in hundreds of different languages across the globe.

Launchpad applies two of the great benefits of the open source development model to translating your software:

• anyone can translate or suggest translations
• translations are automatically shared between projects.

Importantly, Launchpad's simple web interface makes it easy for anyone to help translate your software, while its support of the popular GNU GetText file formats makes it easy to integrate their work into your project.

Note: if you want to help translate Ubuntu, take a look at the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TranslatingUbuntu Ubuntu translations page].

Getting started

You need to do three things before people can use Launchpad to translate your project:

1. Enable translation for one of your [:Projects/SeriesMilestonesReleases#series:series] on your project's Change details page - https://launchpad.net/<yourproject>/+edit

2. Upload a translation template and any existing translation files to the series you want to translate.
3. Choose a permissions policy - i.e. decide who can make what sorts of changes to your translations.

Let's take a look at those in more detail.

Concurrent translation efforts for different series

In Launchpad, you can track parallel lines of development. These might be your development trunk, a previous but still supported release or your next planned stable release. Launchpad calls these [:Projects/SeriesMilestonesReleases#series:series].

Each series of your project has its own translation effort. This is great if, for example, your community wants to start work translating a forthcoming release while independently still maintaining translation of your current release.

Preparing your software for translation

Launchpad uses GNU GetText's file formats to import and and export translations:

• .pot: a template that includes the English text that you want people to translate.

• .po: translations for one language in a human-readable and editable form.

• .mo: a compiled binary form of a .po file.

You can find out more about these file formats and using GNU GetText in the [http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html GetText manual].

You may also find Malcolm Tredinnick's [http://www.gnome.org/~malcolm/i18n/ Gnome internationalisation guide] useful, although some of the Gnome policies mentioned in that guide are now out of date.

Uploading translation files

To make your project available for translation, you must upload its .pot translation template file and any existing .po translations files.

Once you've uploaded these files, a member of the Launchpad team will check that they're suitable before importing them into Launchpad. You can help ensure your files are imported by checking that:

• there isn't already a translation effort in Launchpad for that project
• the files are well formed
• you have permission from the upsteam

Why doesn't Launchpad allow you to directly upload the files yourself?

Before anyone can start translating your software, you must upload a .pot template file. You can find out how to create a .pot file by reading the GNU GetText manual.

• Before anyone can translate your project, you need to upload your software's English user-interface text.

By default, translation is switched off for all new projects. This helps avoid wasted work.

To enable translations for your project, visit

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