gleu's blog - PlanetPostgreSQL

Translating pgAdminIII

Guillaume Lelarge — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:58:00 +0200

Having pgAdminIII translated into as many languages as possible and maintaining translations of high quality is essential. People will not use a tool that they do not understand! The pgAdminIII Project always needs new contributors. You do not need any particular skill, except understanding English, writing your own language correctly and motivation.

Let's see how you can contribute to this project.

First step: contact any existing translators for your language

Reference: the Translation Status Page on pgAminIII's website.

Their might already be contributors to the translation of pgAdmin into your language listed on this page. If this is the case, you should get in touch with them and ask them how you can help. If the page is not up to date, you should warn us.

Second step: download the translation files

The applications are translated using pot files, with a 'po' extension: those files basically contain each English string and its translation. There is also a template for creating a pot file for a new translation: it is the file which has a 'pot' extension. In beta tests time, every time a developper changes a string in the application, he will update the pot files and the translation will have to be updated accordingly. Developers use one shell script to merge the pot file with each already existing po file.

So, all you need to do is downloading the .po file of your language in the translation status page of pgAdminIII's website. If you start a new translation, you shoud ask us. You can also download the pot file from the web SVN browser.

Third step: start translating

If there is a file for your language, you will be able to start translating directly. If not, you will have to create a file for your language by copying the pot file and renaming it with a .po suffix. To find your locale identifier, you can use this page.

To translate, you can use a text editor or .po file editor.

If you want to use a simple text editor, open the po file using your favorite one. You will see a main header composed of likes similar to this:

"Project-Id-Version: pgadmin3\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2009-01-11 00:20+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2009-02-11 13:20+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume@lelarge.info>\n"
"Language-Team: French <fr@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

Update the PO-Revision-Date field with the current date and time and the Last-Translator field with your name and your email so that the next translator can contact you if he has some questions. After that you can start the real translation job.

Every sentence already translated is displayed in the po file as the following one:

msgid "Invalid file name"
msgstr "Nom de fichier non valide"

Untranslated strings are displayed as this one:

msgid "Only local files may be renamed"
msgstr ""

Some strings may also be marked as fuzzy, which means that the original sentence has changed a bit and that the translation is not totally wrong but still needs to be checked and/or fixed. Make sure to remove the '#,fuzzy' after fixing the string.

#, fuzzy
msgid "Screenshot.png"
msgstr " Screenshot"

msgid allows you to identify the original string and msgstr to identify the translated strings. Modifying the msgid strings will have no effect, if you see a typo in one of them, file a bug. To translate a string or update a translation, just modify the text between the "" in the msgstr field.

Some strings may contain slashes or weird characters such as "%s" or "%i". You should always make sure that those characters are also present in the translated string in the same order, or the application will be broken in your language. To check if your translation is valid, you should use the msgfmt tool:

msgfmt -o pgadmin3.mo pgadmin3.po

If it displays any warning, you must fix it before sharing your translation.

You can also use this tool to see the stats for a given po file, that is to say the number of translated messages, the number of fuzzy and untranslated ones:

msgfmt --statistics -o pgadmin3.mo pgadmin3.po

If you don't want to use a text editor, you can use a more advanced tool. There are a lot in the free software world. The one I prefer is poedit, but use the one you feel comfortable with. You can use it to modify the po files. It updated the po headers automatically, sorts the strings by category (translated, fuzzy and untranslated) and provides a friendly interface.

Fourth step: get your translation in

Once you are done with your translations, if there is already a maintainer for your language, you should send him this file asking him politely to review it and get it in. If not, you should compress your .po file and sent it to me (guillaume AT lelarge DOT info) or to the pgAdminIII's hackers mailing list.

We include your translation in pgAdminIII's package when there are more than 85% of translated strings.

Fifth step: this tutorial sucks and you need more information

The pgAdminIII's website contains a lot of information on its translation page. If you have any questions, please ask them on the pgAdminIII's hackers mailing list.

I hope that I was clear enough and that we will be flooded with new or improved translations! We need you!

PS : I've written this text after reading "Translating XFCE". In fact, many parts of this text is a copy and paste from the one I read. So, many thanks to the XFCE team. And shame on me for stealing big parts of their great text

Solutions Linux 2008, PostgreSQLfr booth

Guillaume Lelarge — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:39:00 +0100

Solutions Linux is "The Linux Solutions, Open Source & Free Software Exhibition for Business, Administrations and Communities", according to their website. It's a three days exhibition with some talks (a few of them are free but many others aren't). PostgreSQLfr.org, the french community, has a booth there since 2005.

This year, we were better organized. We updated our flyers with 8.3 informations, we had shirts and tshirts, and many other goodies. We also had some slides (attached in OpenOffice.org 2 Impress format, in french and in english) to show at the booth. Of course, we still had our elephant cake (congrats to Stéphane's wife). Simon Riggs joined us the first day. We had a really great time talking with him about his past and future work on PostgreSQL. We saw him hacking a bit on his truncate triggers patch but he mostly talked PostgreSQL to many people around the booth.

Dimitri Fontaine had a talk about pgloader, his great Python tool to quickly load a bunch of datas in a PostgreSQL database. He also talked about his new project : prefix. Jean-Paul Argudo had a talk about 8.3 new features in the database session. I wasn't there (way too many stuff to do on the booth ), but I heard they did a good job. People were really impressed.

On the evening of the second day, PostgreSQLfr.org had a meeting about future works for the association. Translation will continue, some will join to proof read it (by the way, 8.3 french manual is already available). Lots of work are planned on the website. I'll write other blog entries when some of these works will be done.

pgday.it 2007, RMLL 2007

Guillaume Lelarge — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:16:00 +0200

I think the french guys were the only one who didn't blog (in english) on pgday.it so let's try to put an end to this

We really had a great time in Prato. The complete pgday.it staff (guys and girls) was impressive. Talks were very interesting, at least the advanced ones. It's a bit sad that some talks were so small, Simon's one for example. It's also sad that no dev room were available. But having a chance to meet our friends in real life was something we were eager to do. Well, I think this event was a huge success and I'm already waiting for next year's pgday A really big kudos to our italian team.

RMLL 2007 is a french free software event that last five days. Each year, they choose a different city. This time, it was in Amiens. PostgreSQLfr had a booth at RMLL for the second time. Stéphane and I had quite some visitors. Many of them told us that the Sun benchmark will help them to promote PostgreSQL at work. I didn't have the time to look at them now but it makes them happy, so thanks Sun, thanks Josh. This benchmark will really help us We also gave many flyers and stickers, and talked with many IT professionnals. We still lack some goodies (the italian staff has a lot of them, really different... I was really impressed by that). Unfortunately, mozilla-europe wasn't there so I couldn't ask them about their european group and the way they created it. I'll find another way to get in touch with them. This can help us to bring up the european PostgreSQL group.

I took some pictures that you can see here :

I'll try to put them on flickr when I will have some time.

Re : translation of the postgresql.org website

Guillaume Lelarge — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:00:00 +0100

Alvaro,

As far as I know, you can already do it. Just grab the templates in pgweb CVS and translate each HTML file. There's also a .po file to translate (.pot). News items are, ISTM, on a database.

I'm currently doing the templates' translation for the french language. I've done more than half of them but there's still some work to do

Oh and there was lots of threads about this on pgsql-www, especially :

And this one can be of interest to you : Language data.

Regards.

Pictures from PostgreSQLfr.org booth at Solutions Linux 2007

Guillaume Lelarge — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 09:23:00 +0000

I finally built a gallery with the pictures I took during Solutions Linux 2007. Enjoy

I didn't find the time to write more on Solutions Linux 2007 but it was a really great experience. I just hope Devrim will be able to come at the FOSDEM. jpa and I will be there and we will take some goodies with us. See you there.

Solutions Linux, group's picture

Guillaume Lelarge — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:31:00 +0000

From left to right, top to bottom : Heikki Linnakangas, Guillaume Lelarge, Sébastien Lardière, Magnus Hagander, Damien Clochard, Jean-Paul Argudo and Greg Stark, Devrim Gunduz, Stéphane Schildknecht.

It was really nice to meet you all, guys.

Solutions Linux 2007, day 1

Guillaume Lelarge — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:59:00 +0000

I think Magnus already told a lot about this first day at Solutions Linux. We are happy to have Magnus and Devrim with us at the booth. It's always nice to see people IRL. It's a bit disappointing that we don't have wifi access but at least we can use wired network. We even managed to get https access (I really don't understand why we can have http access but no https access). At least, I can do something for the wired connection : tomorrow I'll bring a hub.

We had some people today, unfortunately less than I thought. Questions were mostly on two subjects : new 8.3 features and configuration settings. I always found interesting to give users some advice on postgresql.conf tuning.

Here are some photos :

Magnus Hagander explaining postgresql.conf fine tuning,
Stéphane Schildknecht and a new postgresqlfr.org member (and Devrim behind, with a really great blue tshirt),
Jean-Paul Argudo, Stéphane Schildknecht and a user,
Damien Clochard and another user

Tomorrow, there will be two talks : one with Magnus and the other with Jean-Paul. It will be great

Oh and I should have written a small paper for pgAdmin : toolbar buttons, menus, stuff like that. I added this on my todo list. I hope to finish soon so I can bring it with me at the FOSDEM.

PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit

Guillaume Lelarge — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 01:19:50 +0000

When I see this program schedule, I'm a bit disappointed for not being there. When I read details of the talks, I'm completely disappointed. The talks that interest me most : Fundraising and Advocacy Meeting, Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL Workshop, Generic Monitoring/Tracing Framework for PostgreSQL, Performance Challenges and Goals Round-Table, Debugging PL/pgSQL, Tsearch2 Development Round-Table, PgPool Development, Slony-I Team Meeting... so much good talks, I'm really ashamed for not being there...

One question... will the talks be recorded ? on cams or something ? because I think many people can't come and are really disappointed about this... It would help them if they can download the videos to see the talks quietly at home. It would be great to have the slides too.

And maybe, we could burn DVD with these videos

I hope you'll all have a great time in Toronto.

New PostgreSQL releases

Guillaume Lelarge — Wed, 24 May 2006 00:25:35 +0000

News is on the web site : Security Release: All Active Branches.

This news is now available on the french web site. The FAQ is also translated. Manuals are up to date (7.4.13, 8.0.8 and 8.1.4). I hope I'll have some time tomorrow morning to translate the User's Guide.

Congrats to all people involved with these updates.

Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8

Guillaume Lelarge — Sun, 07 May 2006 11:14:44 +0000

I use PHP at work since release 3. I used to read everything I could to really understand this language. Since release 4.xx, I could'nt really do that, I had not enough time. So, I saw in Robert Treat's book an opportunity to get back on track with PHP. And I can say I'm not at all disappointed. I learned quite a few things really interesting, but more on the PHP side. For example, I didn't know that we could create custom session handlers.

Well, I think it's a great book for people beginning with PHP and people, like me, who just want an overview of new functionnalities brought by the latest releases. But I still think we miss a book an advanced PostgreSQL administration... I just hope this is what Sébastien Lardière is going to bring us (sorry... link to a french blog... he says that no recent books are available in french, last one didn't cover release 8, no PostgreSQL book specifically targets administration, and that he's writing a new book in french on PostgreSQL8 administration which should be available in a few months).

Not totaly unrelated... I've send two patchs for phpPgAdmin, I hope they'll be applied soon. I also sent a mail on pgsql-docs explaining what the french team did to get a manual in PDF with FOP. Today, I'll try to see how we can fix the issue with standalone statement.

PostgreSQL manual in PDF

Guillaume Lelarge — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 01:08:24 +0000

We have three major releases of the PostgreSQL manual in french : 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1. They are all written in SGML Docbook. We use openjade to convert thems in HTML files, and htmldoc to convert the big HTML file in PDF.

Three weeks ago, friends start talking about migrating to XML Docbook. They mostly did it. I just had some mistakes and a few tags to fix. This done, we used LFS makefile and XSLT files to build the HTML manual. It worked great. But then I told to myself that I should look into building a better PDF manual. htmldoc did a great job with the HTML file we provide but the result was kind of ugly. So I started working on it : fixing some issues in the XML files, adding icons, updating the XSL filters, upgrading FOP.

It took me two weeks to create this PDF manual but I'm very proud of it.

Annotated postgresql.conf file

Guillaume Lelarge — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 20:15:14 +0000

This page is a great addition to the postgresql manual. Unfortunately, it's not available in french. It was on my TODO list but daamien is in the mood of translating it. So, he's on it... When it will be available, we'll put it on the french web site.

By the way, thanks to Josh Berkus for writing it.

Mandriva and Dalibo join around PostgreSQL

Guillaume Lelarge — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 08:29:19 +0000

2006-03-30 - Mandriva has just announced its association with the expert company in free software Dalibo with an aim of providing a technical support to the users of PostgreSQL. This partnership aims at meeting the needs of companies, institutions and users professional, whom seek companies offering councils in design and support. The two companies in particular put some thoughts on setting up a training center on Linux and PostgreSQL within the Parisian buildings of Mandriva.

Mandriva page on this news (in french).