Jesús Amieiro

Tag: translation

  • Placeholders in software translation: a guide for translators

    If you translate software, sooner or later you run into strings like this one from the Galician translation of WordPress core:

    Enlarged image %1$s of %2$s: %3$s

    Or this one from Firefox on Mozilla Pontoon:

    Close { $tabCount } tabs

    Those %1$s and { $tabCount } fragments are placeholders: marks that the program replaces with real content when it runs. They are a common source of doubt for volunteer translators, and mistakes in them can break what users see. This guide covers the main placeholder families, plus other strange symbols (&, _, @, #) that aren’t always placeholders but can cause just as much confusion. The examples come from free software projects with active Galician translation teams, mainly WordPress and Firefox, but the basic principles are useful when translating into any language.

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  • Translation and localization resources

    In this post, I collect some interesting resources to translate and localize software.

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  • Translating WordPress faster

    Translating WordPress faster

    As Galician GTE, I translate a lot of strings from English to Galician: WordPress core, WordPress.org infrastructure, plugins, themes, … As a bilingual speaker (Galician and Spanish languages), I realized I can translate faster if I use the Spanish translations as starting point, so I develop a CLI tool to translate all WordPress stuff from Spanish to Galician, using the open-source translations created by the Spanish community (thank you, folks). A few months later, I converted this CLI tool in a website, so you can use it without any installation. And, of course, I have released it as open source (AGPL).

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  • How to get the number of words in a PO translation file

    If you need to count the number of words in a .PO translation file, you can use the pocount command. This command is part of the translate-toolkit package.

    First, you have to install it in your Linux machine with the command:

     sudo apt install translate-toolkit -y

    Then you have to execute this command with the .po file as first argument:

    pocount myfile.po

Processing file :  myfile.po
 Type               Strings      Words (source)    Words (translation)
 Translated:       0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)               0
 Fuzzy:            0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)             n/a
 Untranslated:   491 (100%)       2615 (100%)             n/a
 Total:          491              2615                      0
 Empty:          491 (100%)       2615 (100%)               0