Important: this page is in preparation for the release of feature that is not yet available in Launchpad.

Launchpad Help > Translations > Partial PO file exports

Exporting partial gettext PO files

Distributions, such as Ubuntu, use Launchpad to translate the free software packages that make up the operating system. Where an upstream project has an existing translation effort, the distribution's translators can import the upstream PO files into Launchpad and either customise those translations to the distro's needs or even correct translation errors.

To make it easier for upstream projects to take advantage of this translation work, Launchpad can generate a partial PO file that contains only the translations that differ from the last imported upstream translation files.

Requesting a partial export

When you are on the web page for the PO file in question, select "Download" from the grey menu bar. You will be presented with the option to choose the file format for the download - either MO or PO format. If you choose the PO format, you will have the choice to either export the full file or just those strings that were changed since they were imported.

How partial PO files differ from full PO files

While a standard PO file has a full gettext header, and so can be edited offline and then re-imported into Launchpad, the partial PO files that Launchpad provides do not have a header.

Note: partial PO files cannot be re-imported into Launchpad because their lack of a header makes them fail the import validation. Please use these files only to merge the translation strings into existing full PO files. Those merged PO files can then, of course, be imported into Launchpad.