Contribute

On this page French (fr) is used for examples. However, it can be replaced with other languages codes. So, be sure to change the /fr suffixes in this guide to the language you are translating!

To see which languages are currently available, you can browse the repository: https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BMT/browse/trunk/blender_docs/locale

Note

First of all, it is assumed that you have the manual already building. If you have not done this already go back too the Getting Started section.

Installing

Language Files

From the directory containing your checkout of the manual run:

svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-manual-translations/trunk/blender_docs/locale/fr locale/fr

This will create a locale/fr subdirectory.

You should have a directory layout like this:

blender_docs
   |- locale/
   |  |- fr/
   |  |  |- LC_MESSAGES/
   |- manual/

Note

When running subversion from the command line (such as updating or committing), you will need to change directory to locale/fr first.

Otherwise you will get a warning: 'locale' is not under version control

A PO Editor

To make edit the PO files you will need to install a PO editor. We recommended that you use Poedit however, any PO editor will do.

Note

For Linux users, you will have to check with your distribution’s software center for a version of Poedit. This editor is only a recommendation. There are others, such as Kate and Kwrite, that could offer syntax highlighting and basic tools for text editing, e.g. letter case transposes. Other platforms can use some text editors supporting the syntax highlighting for PO files, or allowing you to create a custom one (such as Notepad++ on Windows).

Building with Translations

Note

This is optional, translations are automatically built online, e.g: https://docs.blender.org/manual/fr/dev/

Now you can build the manual with the translation applied:

make -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language='fr'"

If you are on Windows and do not have make, run:

sphinx-build -b html -D language=fr ./manual ./build/html

Now you will have a build of the manual with translations applied.

Editing Translation Files

Now you can edit the PO translation files, e.g:

Original RST File

manual/getting_started/about_blender/introduction.rst

Generated PO File

locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/getting_started/about_blender/introduction.po

The modified .po files can be edited and committed back to svn.

Commit Translation Files

See Submit Patches.

Maintenance

Keeping Track of Fuzzy Strings

When the manual is updated, those translations which are outdated will be marked as fuzzy. To keep track with that, you can use a tool we created for that task.

You can do this by running:

make report_po_progress

This will only give a quick summary however, you can get more information by running:

python tools_report/report_translation_progress.py locale/fr/

You should get a list of all the files with information about the number of empty and fuzzy strings. For more options see:

python tools_report/report_translation_progress.py --help

See also

Instructions on this page are based on Sphinx Intl documentation

Updating PO Files

As the original manual changes, the templates will need updating. Note, doing this is not required, as administrator usually update the files for all languages at once. This allows all languages to be on the same version of the manual. However, if you need to update the files yourself, it can be done as follows:

make update_po

The updated templates can then be committed to svn.

See also

A guide how to add a new language can be found in the Adding a Language.