PlacelessTranslationService
- Copyright (C) 2001-2007 Lalo Martins <lalo@laranja.org>,
Zope Corporation and Contributors
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
See license.txt for more details.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
What is PlacelessTranslationService?
PTS is a way of internationalizing (i18n'ing) and localizing (l10n'ing) software for Zope 2. It's based on the files supported by the GNU gettext set of utilities. A good source of information and background reading is the gettext documentation:
Installation
PTS is installed as a normal Zope product. This is usually done by unpacking the distribution into the Products directory of your INSTANCE_HOME and restarting Zope. More information can be found in the Zope Book:
http://zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/MaintainingZope.stx
Using PlacelessTranslationService
PTS is used in the following steps:
- i18n your software
- Prepare a translation template
- Prepare translations of the template
- Install translations
Each of these is explained below.
- Internationalizing Your Software
A good overview of this can be found at: http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/Members/jean/mysite-i18n
- Preparing a Translation Template
A translation template is an empty Portable Object file as defined by the gettext standard with a special header block.
The PO format is described in detail here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_9.html#SEC9
The header block is fairly self explanatory and can be seen in the sample.pot file included in this directory. All phrases in capitals, the language code, language name and (optionally) the content type and preferred encodings should be replaced with their correct values.
There are several ways to prepare a PO template:
-- By hand:
This can be done by copying the blank.pot included in this directory, replacing the sample values as described above and and then manually adding msgid and empty msgstr pairs for each of the msgid's used in your software.
-- Using i18ndude:
i18ndude is a tool that is useful when all your software is in the form of ZPT's that are stored in files on the filesystem.
It can be downloaded from:
Prepare Translations of the Template
Preferably, find a translation company that can handle the gettext standards and send them your .pot file. They should send back .po files for the languages you require.
If you're doing it yourself, copy the .pot file to a file on the name of the language you're translating to and with a .po extension. Then go through that file and fill in the msgstr sections. Finally, update all the metadata fields at the top of the file so they are correct for the translation you have just completed.
At this point, you should have a .pot file and a collection of .po files.
Install Translations
PTS will look in folders called 'i18n' for .po files to use as translations. These 'i18n' folders will be searched if they are in the INSTANCE_HOME or in the directories of any of the Products you have installed.
Copy your .po files to a 'i18n' folder of your choice in one of these locations.
Once that's done, restart Zope.