Export translations

Important

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Just as with importing templates and translations, there are two ways to export your project’s translations from Launchpad:

  • by asking Launchpad to make regular commits to a Bazaar branch you specify

  • or requesting a one-off download through the web interface.

Committing translations to a Bazaar branch

Launchpad can produce a regular snapshot of your translations and commit it to a Launchpad-hosted Bazaar branch of your choice. Using this export method, you can always find a reasonably fresh export of your translations in the same place, and download it automatically, without any asynchronous requests.

It also means that large numbers of developers or translators can get regular, fresh updates of the translation files.

Enabling

The first thing you need is a branch. It doesn’t have to be a branch directly associated with your project, but you do have to be the owner, or a member of the team that owns the branch, and it must be hosted directly on Launchpad.

Tip

Not sure how to upload a branch to Launchpad? See our guide.||

At the moment, team-owned branches don’t work as expected. To work around this, make yourself the owner of the branch, set it as the translations branch, and then make the team the owner of the branch again.

Now, visit the overview page for the series you’re translating, select the Translations tab and then click Settings.

On the Settings page, scroll down to the Export translations to branch section and set the branch where you want Launchpad to commit translations.

If you leave the project at any time, Launchpad will still export the translations to the same branch. It is up to the then project owners to change the destination branch.

Launchpad overwrites existing translation files

Launchpad commits translation files to your branch once a day. You should note that Launchpad does not “edit” the translation files by adding new strings.

Warning

The export brutally overwrites any previous versions of the files in your branch.

In the file that Launchpad writes, translations may have changed but messages may also appear in a different order, or with different comments, and so on.

So, do not expect files that you can merge back into the originals without any further work! The Launchpad database and Bazaar have completely different views of this data.

Directory layout

In the branch, each translation file will have a normalised name (de.po for a German translation, zh_CN.po for Simplified Chinese, eo.po for Esperanto, and so on). Each translation sits in the same directory where its template was located on import.

If you have multiple templates, make sure that they have different directory paths, or the translation files for one will overwrite those for the other! It was already recommended practice to give each template its own directory.

Templates are not exported.

Disabling

If you want to disable the exports, go back to the Settings page for that series’ translations, then click the “pencil” icon next to the branch name. There you can select a different branch or simply clear the input field.

Requesting a one-off download

You can request a .po or .mo file for any one or all of the languages for which your project has translation efforts.

Partial exports

If you don’t want to download a full PO file, you can request an export of only those strings that have changed in Launchpad since the translations were last imported. This is useful if you run an upstream project that has its own translation effort and is also translated using Launchpad for the Ubuntu distribution.

Requesting a partial export

When you are on the web page for the PO file in question, select Download from the grey menu bar. You will be presented with the option to choose the file format for the download - either PO format, or MO format, or Changes from packaged translations in partial PO format. Choose the latter option for a partial export.

Read more about partial exports.

Next steps

Launchpad works with Bazaar to host, mirror and catalogue to branches of your project’s code. It can even import git, Subversion and CVS repositories into Bazaar branches. Let’s take a look at hosting code with Launchpad.