CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I spend several hours trying to understand the translation process and how I can quickly (without having to join translation team and providing translation online etc.) translate several phrases for French and Spanish that were not yet "officially" translated (the phrases are still in English when viewing pages in FR or ES).
The reason I need to do "offline translation" is that the translation was provided to me by a client and I don't really know if it's a "proper" translation or a customized text that is not good enough for "official" translation.

Here is the procedure that works for me (Windows based):

1. Download (one by one, all 18 of them, what a pain) *.po translation files for your current CiviCRM version from http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/civicrm/

For example, all translations for CiviCRM 3.3 are here: http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/civicrm/r/civicrm-33/:
All *.po files for CiviCRM 3.3 French (fr_FR) are here: http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/civicrm/r/civicrm-33/l/fr/
All *po files for CiviCRM 3.3 Spanish (es_ES) are here: http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/civicrm/r/civicrm-33/l/es/

Note: you will need to create an account for this purpose but it's quick and easy - follow instructions on transifex


2. Download Poedit application (http://sourceforge.net/projects/poedit/) that will help you translate chosen strings. Install it.


3. Now you can double click on each of the .po files, find the string you want to translate and provide the translation. Save the file.


4. Once done adding all the translation strings, copy all .po files (there should be 18 of them) to the bin folder in the location where Poedit was installed.

For example, in Windows standard installation for Poedit would be C:\Program Files\Poedit\bin


5. Open command prompt, navigate to the same location C:\Program Files\Poedit\bin

For those who haven't used Windows command prompt for a while, execute the following 2 commands:
cd /
 cd program files/poedit/bin

6. Join all separate .po files into one civicrm.po file by typing in the command prompt:
msgcat -o civicrm.po *.po

7. Compile the civicrm.po file into civicrm.mo by typing in the command prompt:
msgfmt -o civicrm.mo civicrm.po

8. Copy newly created civicrm.mo file into a proper directory to replace the original file (for example, to replace FR file, copy it to sites/all/modules/civicrm/l10n/fr_FR [Drupal path])


Resources:

• http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC33/CiviCRM+Localisation
  http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,17932
  http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2118.0.html
  http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,10211
  http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,10298

Annex: For those who wonder how to decompile .mo file into .po file:
Copy .mo file to Poedit bin directory
Using command prompt, navigate to poedit/bin directory and execute:
msgunfmt input.mo > output.po
Use Poedit to edit that new .po file.


Good luck
Kasia

This is not directly related, but as the maintainer for fr and fr_CA, I have been having a bit of a rough time doing QA/review on the contributed translations, so I started using the command line transifex tool.

I wrote a short howto here:
https://wiki.koumbit.net/CiviCrm/Transifex

It is rather helpful to merge and diff files (combined with git).

As per the latest blog post, I finally managed to come up with a unified (version-agnostic) set of POT/PO files.

The bad news is that you need to adjust your Transifex resources; the good news is that it’s so much simpler to manage now.

Do let me know if you have any questions.

its not possible at the moment to update automaticlly the actual langfiles?

Unfortunately not. :| It used to be that Transifex pushed the translations live to the Git repository, in which case it was possible to have a post-commit that would recompile the translations, but currently it’s a manual (once-a-week or on request) process on my end to pull from Transifex and recompile the files.

Tschüß!

NOTE: Open command prompt as administrator