Translating PYBOSSA

PYBOSSA supports i18n locales, so you can translate the User Interface to any language. By default PYBOSSA comes with several languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Greek and Japanese.

Enabling multiple locales

By default the translations are located in the default theme folder.

You can enable those translations (mostly user interface strings and actions) by doing the following: creating a symlink to the translations folders:

$ cd pybossa && ln -s themes/default/translations

This will use the default translations of PYBOSSA for your server. We recommend to use these translations with the default theme.

Adding a new language

If you want to translate PYBOSSA to your own language, lets say French, all you have to do is create a translation file with this command:

$ pybabel init -i messages.pot -d translations -l fr

Then, open the file translations/fr/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po with any text editor and translate the English strings to French. For example, if you get this string:

#: templates/_gcs_form.html:6 templates/admin/users.html:20
msgid "Search"
msgstr ""

All you have to do is to translate Search to its equivalent in French Rechercher and type in the msgstr section:

#: templates/_gcs_form.html:6 templates/admin/users.html:20
msgid "Search"
msgstr "Rechercher"

Once you have translated all the strings, all you have to do is compile the translation with this command:

$ pybabel compile -d translations

And now enable the new locale in the server local_settings.py file. Check for the LOCALES config variable and add your locale.

Updating translation and adding new strings to the translation

From time to time, the PYBOSSA framework will have new strings to translate. In order to add the new strings (or update previous ones) you have to follow this 3 simple steps.

Step 1, extract new strings which should be translated:

$ cd pybossa
$ pybabel extract . -F translations/../babel.cfg -k lazy_gettext -o translations/messages.pot

Step 2, update existing translation files:

$ pybabel update -i translations/messages.pot -d translations

This will update all translation file (messages.po) and will try to guess some of the translations for saving you time. While this feature is really good, sometimes the translation is not good enough, so you will get the word: fuzzy on top of the translation. Check all the fuzzy translations and fix them. When you are done, remove the line with the word fuzzy and re-compile the translations.

Step 3, recompile translation files:

$ pybabel compile -d translations

Contributing your translation to the upstream repository

We would love to support more and more languages by default, so if you have done a translation and you would like that we include it in the default package, send us a github pull request with your translations or if you prefer by e-mail to info@scifabric.com

We will be very happy to add your contributions to the system.