Friendica translations

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Overview

The Friendica translation process is based on gettext PO files.

Basic worflow:

xgettext is used to collect translation strings across the project in the authoritative PO file located in view/lang/C/messages.po.
This file makes translations strings available at the Transifex Friendica page.
The translation itself is done at Transifex by volunteers.
The resulting PO files by languages are manually updated in view/lang/<language>/messages.po.
PO files are converted to PHP arrays in view/lang/<language>/strings.php that are ultimately used by Friendica to display the translations.

Translate Friendica in your favorite language

Thank you for your interest in improving Friendica's translation! Please register a free Transifex account and ask over at the Transifex Friendica page to join the translation team for your favorite language.

As a rule of thumb, we add support for a language in Friendica when at least 50% of the strings have been translated to avoid a scattered experience. For addons, we add support for a language when if we already support the language in Friendica.

Add new translation strings

Core

Once you have added new translation strings in your code changes, please run bin/run_xgettext.sh from the base Friendica directory and commit the updated view/lang/C/messages.po to your branch.

Addon

If you have the friendica-addons repository in the addon directory of your Friendica cloned repository, just run bin/run_xgettext.sh -a <addon_name> from the base Friendica directory.

Otherwise:

cd /path/to/friendica-addons/<addon_name>
/path/to/friendica/bin/run_xgettext.sh -s

In either case, you need to commit the updated <addon_name>/lang/C/messages.po to your working branch.

Update translations from Transifex

Please download the Transifex file "for use" in view/lang/<language>/messages.po.

Then run bin/console po2php view/lang/<language>/messages.po to update the related strings.php file and commit both files to your working branch.

Using the Transifex client

Transifex has a client program which allows you to sync files between your cloned Friendica repository and Transifex. Help for the client can be found at the Transifex Help Center. Here we will only cover basic usage.

After installation of the client, you should have a tx command available on your system. To use it, first create a configuration file with your credentials. On Linux this file should be placed into your home directory ~/.transifexrc. The content of the file should be something like the following:

[https://www.transifex.com]
username = user
token =
password = p@ssw0rd
hostname = https://www.transifex.com

Since Friendica version 3.5.1 we ship configuration files for the Transifex client in the core repository and the addon repository in .tx/config. To update the PO files after you have translated strings of e.g. Esperanto on the Transifex website you can use tx to download the updated PO file in the right location.

$> tx pull -l eo