Translating BOINC

The translation of BOINC involves several steps:

• Generate "templates" (.pot files) containing translatable strings from the BOINC source code.
• Commit updated template(s) and upload to Transifex.
• Volunteers translate the strings on Transifex.
• Updated translations are downloaded to the BOINC Git repo on GitHub.
• Deploy the new translations.

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

Component	directory	Template file	Language files
BOINC web site	doc/	locale/templates/BOINC-Web.pot	locale/<lang>/BOINC-Web.po
Project web site	html/user/	locale/templates/BOINC-Project-Generic.pot	html/languages/translations/<lang>.po
Client	client/	locale/templates/BOINC-Client.pot	locale/<lang>/BOINC-Client.po
Manager	clientgui/	locale/templates/BOINC-Manager.pot	locale/<lang>/BOINC-Manager.po
Mac installer	mac_installer/	locale/templates/BOINC-Setup.pot	locale/<lang>/BOINC-Setup.po
Android GUI	android/	android/BOINC/res/values/strings.xml	android/BOINC/res/values-<lang>/strings.xml

In order to update templates or translations one needs to have write permissions in the BOINC github repository and be a maintainer on the BOINC Transifex project. The tools xgettext, tx and pocompile (Debian packages: gettext, transifex-client, translate-toolkit) need to be installed to do the updates. Android uses different language codes for regional languages so there is an additional mapping configured in .tx/config.

Software releases

Translation activity takes place in master. 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

New templates are needed if translatable strings change in source code. The script locale/update_templates.sh generates the templates (except Drupal and Android), commits them to the repository and pushes them to Transifex. You can check the template generation by using the -t testmode switch. Transifex has a Translation Memory so pushing a faulty template does not remove existing translations. Just push a fixed template and translations will be recovered.

Templates for Android and Drupal need to be committed and pushed to Transifex (use tx push -s) separately.

Projects can create templates for their project specific website using html/ops/build_po.php and send it to Transifex for translation too.

Translation

New translations need to be downloaded from Transifex and committed into the BOINC Github repository using locale/update_translations.sh. Translations are only downloaded if they are 100% complete and already present in the repository. New translations need to be downloaded using tx pull -a.

This workflow currently does not delete outdated translation files from the git repository!

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

There is currently no detailed workflow how to deploy project specific translations. But one needs to adapt .tx/config and locale/update_translations.sh accordingly to download project-specific translations to html/languages/project_specific_translations/ and compile them together using html/ops/update_translations.php.

The Drupal website contains an admin function to directly download translations from Transifex (for Drupal generic and project-specific parts).