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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 and/or suggest translations
• translations are easily shared between projects.

Importantly, Launchpad's simple web interface provides a friendly environment in which non-technical people can 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 Ubuntu translations page.

Getting started

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

1. Enable translation by following the Change details link on your project's overview 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.

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 GetText manual.

Tip: you may also find Malcolm Tredinnick's Gnome internationalisation guide useful, although some of the Gnome policies mentioned in that guide are now out of date.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 a .pot translation template file. This file tells Launchpad which English strings your software uses.

You can also, optionally, upload any existing .po translations files; to upload a template and existing translation files together, you should create a tar archive of them.

To view the current status of your project's translationsimports, visit https://translations.launchpad.net/<your-project>/+imports.

Concurrent translation efforts for different series

In Launchpad, a series is a line of development, such as your development trunk, a previous but still supported release or your next planned stable release. Launchpad calls these 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 still maintaining a separate translation effort for your current release.

Uploading files is easy: visit https://translations.launchpad.net/<your-project> and select the series to which you want to upload the template and translations.

Once you've uploaded these files, a member of the Launchpad team will check that they're suitable before importing them into Launchpad. Launchpad should accept subsequent uploads automatically, provided you don't change the location or name of your translation files.

Ensuring a successful import

You can help ensure your files are imported by checking that:

• there isn't already a translation effort in Launchpad for that project
• you have permission from the upsteam project, if that's not you.

There are also some common problems that can cause a template or translation file import to fail.

For translation templates:

• Make sure each of the message IDs - i.e. the English strings - is unique.

• Use real English strings - for example Save the file - rather than identifiers, such as save_msg_z339.

For translation files:

• Ensure consistent formatting: for example, if "%d" appears in an original English string, make sure it's also in each language's equivalent.
• Use consistent paths within your tarball: locate all your .po translation files under the same directory structure.
• Name individual language .po files using the ISO language code. Only append the country code in the following circumstances:

  • variants of international English: for example, en_gb.po

  • Brazillian Portugese: pt_br.po (Brazillian Portugese), rather than pt.po for European Portugese

  • Chinese: traditional zh_tw.po and simplified zh_cn.po

Launchpad will email you to let you know if your import is a success or a failure.

Maintaining quality

There are a couple of ways that Launchpad helps you to balance making it easy for people to contribute to your project's translations, while maintaining quality control:

• permission policies: choose one of four ready-made policies, each with a different balance between spontaneous contribution and review of work

• translations groups: an umbrella group of Launchpad teams, who have certain permissions to work on your project's translations.

Translations groups

Depending on which permissions policy you choose, Launchpad makes it very easy for anyone to suggest translations for your project. However, to maintain the quality of your project's localisation, you should find someone you trust who can review those translations.

Translation groups are a convenient way to delegate responsibility for reviewing translations. The important thing to remember about them is that they're independent of any one project. So, as a project owner, you can either choose to work with an existing translation group or create your own.

Within each translation group, an individual or team is assigned to look after one or more languages. When you choose a translation group, you're entrusting the review of your project's translations to its members. Not only must you be certain that you're comfortable with the people already involved in the group but you must also be sure that you're happy with their methods of vetting new recruits.

The advantage of working with an existing translation group is that they should already have established teams for several languages, as well as the community processes necessary to ensure efficient review. However, selecting a translation group is not the same as persuading people to review translations made for your project!

An example translation group

Let's take a look at an example translation group, the biggest in Launchpad: Ubuntu Translators.

By visiting the group's overview page, you can see which:

• individual or team owns the group
• individuals and teams are assigned to which languages
• projects and distributions have delegated their translation review to Ubuntu Translators.

Working with an existing translation group

To choose an existing translation group, visit https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+changetranslators.

Although many projects find that people spontaneously contribute translations to their projects, you now need to encourage the teams within your chosen group to review translations in your project.

Creating your own translation group

If you have specific requirements for the people who review your project's translations, you may want to create your own translation group.

The only way to do that is to file a support request with the Launchpad administrators.

Choosing a permissions policy

Launchpad offers you four ready-made permissions structures. These control who can submit and review translations for your project:

• Open: anyone can submit translations directly to your project in Launchpad. Great for encouraging drive-by contributions.

• Restricted: if your project's translation group has assigned an individual or team to a particular language, only that person or members of that team can review and accept translation strings for that language. Anyone can suggest a translation for those languages, though. For languages that aren't associated with a translation group, anyone can directly submit a translation.

• Structured: similar to restricted, except that translations are closed on languages that don't have an individual or team assigned to it within the translation group.

• Closed: only people or teams appointed in the appropriate translation group can suggest or make translations. Translation is closed to everyone else. This is ideal if your project requires an agreement to transfer copyright before starting work.

Set your project's permissions policy at https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+changetranslators.

Exporting translations

You can download a .po or .mo file for any one or all of the languages for which your project has translation efforts.

• Download all translations: use the download link on the translations overview page for the relevant series of your project - e.g. https://translations.launchpad.net/silva

• Download translation for one language: use the download link on that language's overview page - e.g. https://translations.launchpad.net/silva/trunk/+pots/silva/nl/+translate

Next steps

To maintain the quality of your project's translations, you'll need some community help. Let's look at translation groups.