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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 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 [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 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.

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].

Tip: 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Gnome internationalisation guide] useful, although some of the Gnome policies mentioned in that guide are now out of date.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 a .pot translation template file. This files tells Launchpad which English strings appear in your software. 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.

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 [: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.

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 future uploads automatically, although it will

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 message id - i.e. the English strings - is unique.

• Use real English strings - for example Save the file - rather than identifiers, such as click_save_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 was 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 translations to your project's translations with the need for quality control:

• permission policies: choose one of four ready-made policies, that help you choose that right trade-off between spontaneous contributions and review

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

Translations groups

If you want to

You can use Launchpad teams to organise who works on translations

Choosing a permissions policy

Launchpad offers you four ready-made permissions structures to help you choose 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.

• Partly restricted: if a particular language has an associated translation group, only members of that translation group can review and accept translation strings for that language. Anyone can suggest a translation for those language, though. For languages that aren't associated with a translation group, anyone can directly submit a translation.

• Structured: similar to partly restricted, except that translations are closed on languages that don't have a translation group.

• Closed: only members of the appropriate translation groups 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 on the

• 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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