start

# The Translate Toolkit

The Translate Toolkit is a toolkit to convert between various different translation formats (such as gettext-based .po formats, OpenOffice.org formats, and Mozilla formats). This makes it possible to stay in one format across all your localisation, thus allowing you to master one translation editor instead of one per project. Of course an added benefit is that now you cannot create broken OpenOffice.org or Mozilla translation files. And of course their are many other [benefits].

The toolkit also includes tools to help check, validate, merge and extract from your localizations.

The toolkit forms part of the WordForge project, which is building standards based localisation tools for Free and Open Source Software.

These documents are currently maintained in the wiki at http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/index They are also packaged together with the Translate Toolkit source code for distribution - if you are reading this on your local filesystem that is likely how you have got them. If you want the latest version or want to make changes, consult the above wiki.

# Quick Start

- Installation
- Features
- Important changes
- General usage
- Contributing
- Reporting bugs
- Copyright

# Use Cases

- Migrating an older version of your translations to the latest templates
- Checking for technical errors in your translations
- Translating using only a spreadsheet (a look at the whole roundtrip from PO to CSV and back)
- Creating OpenOffice.org POT files
- Creating Mozilla POT files
- Migrating Mozilla translations to Firefox
- Checking for inconsitencies in your translations
- Creating a terminology list from your existing translations
- Running the tools on Microsoft Windows
- Using `phase` for the complete translation roundtrip

# Converters

Converters change many different formats to PO and back again. (Sometimes only one direction is supported, or conversion is done without PO files.)

- oo2po - OpenOffice.org SDF converter
- moz2po - Mozilla .properties and .dtd converter. Works with Firefox and Thunderbird
- csv2po - Comma Seperated Value (CSV) converter. Useful for doing translations using a spreadsheet.
- ts2po - Qt .ts converter
- txt2po - Plain text to PO converter
- html2po - HTML converter
- xliff2po - XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) converter
- prop2po - Java property file (.properties) convertor
- po2tmx - TMX (Translation Memory Exchange) convertor
- pot2po - initialise PO Template files for translation
- csv2tbx - Create TBX (TermBase eXchange) files from Comma Seperated Value (CSV) files

These use the toolkit but are not part of the toolkit, please refer to the site for usage instructions

- tiki2po - convert TikiWiki translation files to po

# Tools

The PO tools allow you to manipulate and work with PO files

- pocompile - create an MO (Machine Object) file from a PO file
- poconflict - extract messages that have conflicting translation
- pocount - Count words and string in PO files
- podebug - Add debug strings to messages
- pofilter - filter PO files to find common errors using a number of tests
- pogrep - find strings in your PO files
- pomerge - merge file extracted using pofilter back into the original files
- porestructure - restructures po files according to poconflict directives
- poswap - uses a translation of another language that you would rather use than English as source language
- poclean - produces a clean file from an unclean file (Trados/Wordfast) by stripping out the tw4win indicators
- lookupserver - a server that can be queried with XML-RPC to lookup strings in a storage format

# Scripts

The scripts are for working with and manipulating PO files. Unlike the `tools` which are written in Python, the scripts are written in `bash`. Some of them are packaged since version 1.0 of the toolkit, but you might need to download them from version control and do a manual installation .

- phase - Helps manage a project divided into phases of work, including sending, checking, etc
- pocompendium - Creates various types of PO compendium
- poglossary - Create a glossary of terms from existing po translations
- poen - Initialises POT files to English translations
- pomigrate2 - Migrate older PO files to new POT files
- popuretext - Extracts all the source text from a directory of POT files
- posplit - Split a PO file into translate, untranslated and fuzzy files
- poreencode - Converts PO files to a new character encoding
- moz-l10n-builder - Create Mozilla XPIs and rebuild Windows installers from existing translations