Translating BOINC

The translation of BOINC involves several steps:

• Generate "templates" (.pot files) containing translatable strings from the BOINC source code.
• Import these templates into Pootle.
• Volunteers translate the strings in Pootle.
• Export the translations (*.po files) from Pootle to the BOINC Git repo
• Deploy the new translations.

BOINC is divided into the following components, each with its own template file:

Component	directory	Template file	Command
BOINC web site	doc/	BOINC-Web.pot	build_po.php
Project web site	html/user/	BOINC-Project-Generic.pot	html/ops/build_po_boinc.php
Client	client/	BOINC-Client.pot	build_po
Manager	clientgui/	BOINC-Manager.pot	build_po
Mac installer	mac_installer/	BOINC-Setup.pot	build_po
Android GUI	android/	BOINC-Android.pot	a2po export -v

All template files are stored in locale/templates/ in the BOINC repo. The translations for language X are stored in locale/X/.

Software releases

Translation activity takes place in trunk. When a release branch (client or server) is created, its translations are the contents of locale/ at that point. If translations change after that, or new translatable strings are added to the branch, we'll need to back-port changes to the .po files.

Template generation

If a faulty template file is committed to the BOINC repo and picked up by Pootle, all existing translations will be lost. Therefore manual validation is used. The process is as follows:

• Once a day, a script build_pos is run as a cron job.

This script generates a template for each component, leaving the .pot file in the component directory. It then compares the .pot file with the one in locale/templates. If they differ (not counting comments) it sends an email to Rom and David.

• On receiving this email, Rom and/or David examines the new template file.

If it's valid, they move it to locale/templates and commit it.

Translation

Twice daily a cron job pulls modified templates from the BOINC repo and adds them to the Pootle database. DETAILS?

Pootle takes care of the bulk of this with the following commands (pootle/update.sh):

/usr/bin/pootle commit_to_vcs --project boinctrunk
/usr/bin/pootle update_from_vcs --project boinctrunk
/usr/bin/pootle update_against_templates --project boinctrunk
/usr/bin/pootle refresh_stats --project boinctrunk

Post Translation Updates

After all the latest updates have been committed the compiled PO files need to be updated. The end of the pootle/update.sh file executes boinc/locale/updatetrans.sh which handles compiling the PO files into MO files. IS THIS AUTOMATED?

Converting the Android PO file back into the native Android localization system XML files involves executing:

a2po export -v

Deployment

The BOINC web site

The BOINC web code expects translation files to be in ../languages/translations/. On the BOINC web server, this directory contains symbolic links from X.po to ../../locale/X/BOINC-Web.po.

'When we add a new language, we need to add a new symbolic link.'

Deploying new translations requires running the script doc/update_translations.php, which converts the .po files to a PHP translation array. This is done from cron.

Project web sites