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Translating via spreadsheets

Not all translators are comfortable with using PO-editors such as Poedit or translation tools like WebLate or Transifex. For them this package provides simple tools to convert PO-files to xlsx-files and back again. This also has another benefit: it is possible to include multiple languages in a single spreadsheet, which can be helpful when translating to multiple similar languages at the same time (for example simplified and traditional chinese).

The format for spreadsheets is simple:

  • If any message use a message context the first column will specify the context. If message contexts are not used this column will be skipped.
  • The next (or first) column contains the message id. This is generally the canonical text.
  • A set of columns for any requested comment types (message occurrences, source comments or translator comments).
  • A column with the translated text for each locale. Fuzzy translations are marked in italic.

The first row contains the column headers. ``xls-to-po`` uses these to locale information in the file, so make sure never to change these!

Catalog to spreadshseet

Converting one or more PO-files to an xls file is done with the po-to-xls command:

po-to-xls nl.po

This will create a new file messages.xlsx with the Dutch translations. Multiple PO files can be specified:

po-to-xls -o texts.xlsx zh_CN.po zh_TW.po nl.po

This will generate a texts.xlsx file with all simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Dutch translations.

po-to-xls will guess the locale for a PO file by looking at the Language key in the file metadata, falling back to the filename if no language information is specified. You can override this by explicitly specifying the locale on the commandline. For example:

po-to-xs nl:locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po

This will read locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po and treat it as Dutch (nl locale).

You can also use the -c or --comments option with one of those choices: translator, extracted, reference, all to add more column in the output.

Spreadshseet to catalog

Translations can be converted back from a spreadsheet into a PO-file using the xls-to-po command:

xls-to-po nl texts.xlsx nl.po

This will take the Dutch (nl) translations from texts.xls, and (re)create a nl.po file using those. You can merge those into an existing po-file using a tool like gettext's msgmerge.

You can ignore specific sheets by using -i or --ignore. For example:

xls-to-po -i 'Read Me First' -i Appendix nl texts.xlsx nl.po

Will ignore sheets Read Me First and Appendix of the book.