The Friendica translation process is based on gettext
PO files.
Basic workflow:
xgettext
is used to collect translation strings across the project in the authoritative PO file located inview/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.
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.
We currently support the gettext version 0.19.8.1 and actively check new translation strings with this version.
If you don't use this version, it's possible that our checks fail (f.e. because of tiny differences at linebreaks). In case you do have a Docker environment, you can easily update the translations with the following command:
docker run --rm -v $PWD:/data -w /data friendicaci/transifex bin/run_xgettext.sh
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.
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.
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.
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://app.transifex.com]
username = user
token =
password = p@ssw0rd
hostname = https://app.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
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.
Friendica\DI::l10n()->t('Label')
=>Label
Friendica\DI::l10n()->t('Label %s', 'test')
=>Label test
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('Label', 'Labels', 1)
=>Label
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('Label', 'Labels', 3)
=>Labels
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('%d Label', '%d Labels', 1)
=>1 Label
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('%d Label', '%d Labels', 3)
=>3 Labels
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('%d Label', 'Labels %2%s %3%s', 1, 'test', 'test2')
=>Label test test2
Friendica\DI::l10n()->tt('%d Label', 'Labels %2%s %3%s', 3, 'test', 'test2')
=>Labels test test2