start => pootle

# Pootle Terminology

The underlying toolkit base classes define these concepts:

- A TranslationStore is a file that stores translations (e.g. a PO file) - although it could also be used to refer to other ways of storing translations.
- A TranslationStore contains a number of TranslationUnits which contain messages
- At the simplest level a TranslationUnit would contain a single source string (the original message) and a single target string (the translated message).
- Note that monolingual formats (like .properties, OpenOffice SDF, DTD, HTML, etc.) only contain a source string.
- However when handling plurals the source may actually contain different variants of a message for different plural forms (e.g. in English, the singular and plural), and the target as well (the number of variants in source and target strings are often different because different languages handle plurals differently).

In Pootle we have:

- Languages referring to the languages translated into
- Projects referring to the different programs / sets of messages we translate
- TranslationProjects (which are a set of translation stores translating a project into a language)