Adding a Language
Preparations
If the language you want to translate has not been started by someone else already and you wish to create a set of new files for the desired language, say ’fr’ (French), then you must first use the environment you have created, as guided in Getting Started, in particular Installing Dependencies and Building the Manual sections.
This will give you a foundation environment for:
Creating a new set of translation language from English source.
Perform
make
command to turn translated texts in po files into html files for testing locally.Update changes in English texts which have been added by other contributors.
Below examples show the process to create a new set of files for French, language code fr
, on Linux platform.
Other platforms might vary slightly but should be mainly the same.
Goto
https://developer.blender.org
to create an account for yourself and become a developer/translator for the Blender organization.Login the account and create a task with
todo
type, addressing an administrator in the Subscribers field, requesting for a committer right in order to transfer changes to the central repository of the translation team.Open an instance of the console application, such as Gnome-Terminal emulator.
Change the current working directory to the directory of
blender_docs
, where the instance ofMakefile
resides.
Trying the Make Process to Create HTML Files in English
Ensure the previous instance of
build
directory is removed, if any exists:make clean
Convert all the
rst
files intopot
translation files:make gettext
Create
html
files:make html
After this, you can actually view the created html files locally following the prompted instruction, such as:
xdg-open <path to your English manual>/blender_docs/build/html/index.html
Setting the Local Configuration File
Open a text editor to enter the following texts, change the language code to whatever the language you will be translating:
1language = 'fr' 2locale_dirs = ['locale/'] 3gettext_compact = True
Save this file as
conf.py
in theblender_docs
directory, whereMakefile
resides.Tells
svn
to ignore this file when performing operations by executing this shell command:svn propset svn:ignore conf.py .
Generating the Set of Files for the Target Language
Check out the current translation repository using the command:
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-manual-translations/trunk/blender_docs/locale
This will download all language sets available in the repository into the
locale
directory of your drive. You can go to thelocale
directory to see the hidden subdirectory.svn
within it, together with directories of languages. You’ll need to add your own set of files for the language you are trying to translating to.From the
blender_docs
directory to generate a set of files forfr
language:make gettext sphinx-intl update -p build/locale -l fr
These files are still in English only, with all
msgstr
entries blank.Submit new set of files to the central repository:
cd locale svn add fr svn commit --username <your username> -m "Initial commit language set of files for French"
You don’t need all other languages being there, so remove the locale directory for the time being:
rm -fr locale
We will download this new set of language as guided in the next section.
Obs
It is recommended you make two environment variables for these directories, in the
.bashrc
to make it more convenient for changing or scripting batch/shell commands for the process of translation and reviewing results:export BLENDER_MAN_EN=$HOME/<directory to make file directory above>/blender_docs export BLENDER_MAN_FR=$BLENDER_MAN_EN/locale
Newly generated files will contain some placeholders for authors and revision dates etc. If you find the job of replacing them repetitive, make use of the script
change_placeholders.sh
in the subdirectory~/blender_docs/toos_maintenance
, make a copy of that to your localbin
directory and replace all values that were mentioned in the file with your specific details, then after each change to a file, you would do following commands to update the file with your personal details, revision date and time, plus generating the html files for your language, which you can view using your Internet browser:$HOME/bin/change_placeholders.sh $BLENDER_MAN_FR make -d --trace -w -B -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language='fr'" 2>&1