Weblate can handle all the translation things semi-automatically for you. If you give it push access to your repository, the translations can happen without interaction, unless some merge conflict occurs.
- Set up your Git repository to tell Weblate when there is any change, see
hooks
for info on how to do it. - Set a push URL at your
component
in Weblate, this allows Weblate to push changes to your repository. - Turn on push-on-commit on your
project
in Weblate, this will make Weblate push changes to your repository whenever they happen at Weblate.
continuous-translation
, avoid-merge-conflicts
Please see vcs-repos
for info on setting up SSH keys.
Merge conflicts happen from time to time when the translation file is changed in both Weblate and the upstream repository concurrently. You can usually avoid this by merging Weblate translations prior to making changes in the translation files (e.g. before running msgmerge). Just tell Weblate to commit all pending translations (you can do it in Repository maintenance
in the Manage
menu) and merge the repository (if automatic push is not on).
If you've already ran into a merge conflict, the easiest way is to solve all conflicts locally at your workstation - is to simply add Weblate as a remote repository, merge it into upstream and fix any conflicts. Once you push changes back, Weblate will be able to use the merged version without any other special actions.
Note
Depending on your setup, access to the Weblte repository might require authentication. When using the built in git-exporter
in Weblate, you authenticate with your username and the API key.
# Commit all pending changes in Weblate, you can do this in the UI as well:
wlc commit
# Lock the translation in Weblate, again this can be done in the UI as well:
wlc lock
# Add Weblate as remote:
git remote add weblate https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/component/
# You might need to include credentials in some cases:
git remote add weblate https://username:APIKEY@hosted.weblate.org/git/project/component/
# Update weblate remote:
git remote update weblate
# Merge Weblate changes:
git merge weblate/master
# Resolve conflicts:
edit …
git add …
…
git commit
# Push changes to upstream repository, Weblate will fetch merge from there:
git push
# Open Weblate for translation:
wlc unlock
If you're using multiple branches in Weblate, you can do the same to all of them:
# Add and update Weblate remotes
git remote add weblate-one https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/one/
git remote add weblate-second https://hosted.weblate.org/git/project/second/
git remote update weblate-one weblate-second
# Merge QA_4_7 branch:
git checkout QA_4_7
git merge weblate-one/QA_4_7
... # Resolve conflicts
git commit
# Merge master branch:
git checkout master
git merge weblates-second/master
... # Resolve conflicts
git commit
# Push changes to the upstream repository, Weblate will fetch the merge from there:
git push
In case of gettext PO files, there is a way to merge conflicts in a semi-automatic way:
Fetch and keep a local clone of the Weblate Git repository. Also get a second fresh local clone of the upstream Git repository (i. e. you need two copies of the upstream Git repository: An intact and a working copy):
# Add remote:
git remote add weblate /path/to/weblate/snapshot/
# Update Weblate remote:
git remote update weblate
# Merge Weblate changes:
git merge weblate/master
# Resolve conflicts in the PO files:
for PO in `find . -name '*.po'` ; do
msgcat --use-first /path/to/weblate/snapshot/$PO\
/path/to/upstream/snapshot/$PO -o $PO.merge
msgmerge --previous --lang=${PO%.po} $PO.merge domain.pot -o $PO
rm $PO.merge
git add $PO
done
git commit
# Push changes to the upstream repository, Weblate will fetch merge from there:
git push
git-export
, continuous-translation
, avoid-merge-conflicts
Weblate supports pushing translation changes within one project
. For every component
which has it turned on (the default behavior), the change made is automatically propagated to others. This way translations are kept synchronized even if the branches themselves have already diverged quite a lot, and it is not possible to simply merge translation changes between them.
Once you merge changes from Weblate, you might have to merge these branches (depending on your development workflow) discarding differences:
git merge -s ours origin/maintenance
translation-consistency
Weblate supports a wide range of file formats (see formats
) and the easiest approach is to use the native format for each platform.
Once you have added all platform translation files as components in one project (see adding-projects
), you can utilize the translation propagation feature (turned on by default, and can be turned off in the component
) to translate strings for all platforms at once.
translation-consistency
There is nothing special about the repository, it lives under the DATA_DIR
directory and is named vcs/<project>/<component>/
. If you have SSH access to this machine, you can use the repository directly.
For anonymous access, you might want to run a Git server and let it serve the repository to the outside world.
Alternatively, you can use git-exporter
inside Weblate to automate this.
This heavily depends on your setup, Weblate is quite flexible in this area. Here are examples of some workflows used with Weblate:
- Weblate automatically pushes and merges changes (see
auto-workflow
). - You manually tell Weblate to push (it needs push access to the upstream repository).
- Somebody manually merges changes from the Weblate git repository into the upstream repository.
- Somebody rewrites history produced by Weblate (e.g. by eliminating merge commits), merges changes, and tells Weblate to reset the content in the upstream repository.
Of course you are free to mix all of these as you wish.
You can use git submodule for separating translations from source code while still having them under version control.
- Create a repository with your translation files.
Add this as a submodule to your code:
git submodule add git@example.com:project-translations.git path/to/translations
- Link Weblate to this repository, it no longer needs access to the repository containing your source code.
You can update the main repository with translations from Weblate by:
git submodule update --remote path/to/translations
Please consult the git submodule documentation for more details.
Weblate includes a set of configuration checks which you can see in the admin interface, just follow the Performance report
link in the admin interface, or open the /manage/performance/
URL directly.
Weblate uses Django's sites framework and defines the sitename inside the database. You need to set the domain name to match your installation.
production-site
Why are all commits committed by Weblate <noreply@weblate.org>?
This is the default committer name, configured when you create a translation component. You can change it in the administration at any time.
The author of every commit (if the underlying VCS supports it) is still recorded correctly as the user that made the translation.
component
- You can subscribe to any changes made in
subscriptions
and then check others contributions as they come in by e-mail. - There is a review tool available at the bottom of the translation view, where you can choose to browse translations made by others since a given date.
On context tabs below translation, you can use the Source
tab to provide feedback on a source string, or discuss it with other translators.
- Use the import functionality to load compendium as translations, suggestions or translations needing review. This is the best approach for a one-time translation using a compendium or a similar translation database.
- You can set up
tmserver
with all databases you have and let Weblate use it. This is good when you want to use it several times during translation. - Another option is to translate all related projects in a single Weblate instance, which will make it automatically pick up translations from other projects as well.
machine-translation-setup
, machine-translation
Weblate tries to limit changes in translation files to a minimum. For some file formats it might unfortunately lead to reformatting the file. If you want to keep the file formatted your way, please use a pre-commit hook for that.
For monolingual files (see formats
) Weblate might add new translation strings not present in the template
, and not in actual translations. It does not however perform any automatic cleanup of stale strings as that might have unexpected outcomes. If you want to do this, please install a pre-commit hook which will handle the cleanup according to your requirements.
Weblate also will not try to update bilingual files in any way, so if you need po
files being updated from pot
, you need to do it yourself.
processing
The basic set of language definitions is included within Weblate and Translate-toolkit. This covers more than 150 languages and includes info about plural forms or text direction.
You are free to define your own languages in the administrative interface, you just need to provide info about it.
Weblate supports this, however it needs the data to show the difference.
For Gettext PO files, you have to pass the parameter --previous
to msgmerge
when updating PO files, for example:
msgmerge --previous -U po/cs.po po/phpmyadmin.pot
For monolingual translations, Weblate can find the previous string by ID, so it shows the differences automatically.
Weblate does not try to manipulate the translation files in any way other than allowing translators to translate. So it also does not update the translatable files when the template or source code have been changed. You simply have to do this manually and push changes to the repository, Weblate will then pick up the changes automatically.
Note
It is usually a good idea to merge changes done in Weblate before updating translation files, as otherwise you will usually end up with some conflicts to merge.
For example with gettext PO files, you can update the translation files using the msgmerge
tool:
msgmerge -U locale/cs/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo locale/django.pot
In case you want to do the update automatically, you can install addon addon-weblate.gettext.msgmerge
.
This happens sometimes when your Git repository grows too much and you have many of them. Compressing the Git repositories will improve this situation.
The easiest way to do this is to run:
# Go to DATA_DIR directory
cd data/vcs
# Compress all Git repositories
for d in */* ; do
pushd $d
git gc
popd
done
DATA_DIR
This is most likely caused by an improperly configured ALLOWED_HOSTS
. It needs to contain all hostnames you want to access on your Weblate. For example:
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['weblate.example.com', 'weblate', 'localhost']
production-hosts
Weblate currently does not have native support for anything other than vcs-git
(with extended support for vcs-github
, vcs-gerrit
and vcs-git-svn
) and ref:vcs-mercurial, but it is possible to write backends for other VCSes.
You can also use vcs-git-helpers
in Git to access other VCSes.
Weblate also supports VCS less operation, see vcs-local
.
Note
For native support of other VCSes, Weblate requires using distributed VCS, and could probably be adjusted to work with anything other than Git and Mercurial, but somebody has to implement this support.
vcs
Every change made in Weblate is committed into VCS under the translators name. This way every single change has proper authorship, and you can track it down using the standard VCS tools you use for code.
Additionally, when the translation file format supports it, the file headers are updated to include the translator's name.
list_translators
Weblate was designed in a way that every PO file is represented as a single component. This is beneficial for translators, so they know what they are actually translating. If you feel your project should be translated as one, consider merging these po files. It will make life easier even for translators not using Weblate.
Note
In case there is great demand for this feature, it might be implemented in future versions.
These are language codes defined by 4646
to better indicate that they are really different languages instead previously wrongly used modifiers (for @latin
variants) or country codes (for Chinese).
Weblate still understands legacy language codes and will map them to current one - for example sr@latin
will be handled as sr_Latn
or zh@CN
as sr_Hans
.