Kuku/Localization

Strings

• activity name: Kuku Anakula
• start screen: Begin!
  • english: Begin!
  • swahili: Kuanza!

Code Comments

When we start to comment the code with comments and docstrings, we will ask for translations and add in i18n.

Intstructions for i18n in a pygame app

Following the wxpython tutorial below, I added the following code at the top of my application:

import gettext
gettext.install('kuku', './locale', unicode=False)

#one line for each language
presLan_en = gettext.translation("kuku", "./locale", languages=['en'])
presLan_sw = gettext.translation("kuku", "./locale", languages=['sw'])

#only install one language - add program logic later
presLan_en.install()
# presLan_sw.install()

Here my application is called kuku.py, and I am using 'kuku' to be the domain of my i18n. Now I choose which strings I needed to localize within my application file kuku.py - these strings I surrounded with _(). For example

message = _('Begin!')

Next I need to create the i18n files. First I create a directory called 'locale' within my activity directory (this is referred to in the above lines (presLan_en ...). The first step is to make a pot file, which I use pygettext.py to process kuku.py

python <path to your python distribution>/Tools/i18n/pygettext.py -o kuku.pot kuku.py

which creates kuku.pot. When first created it looks like

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR ORGANIZATION
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2007-06-19 17:45+EDT\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: ENCODING\n"
"Generated-By: pygettext.py 1.5\n"


#: kuku.py:501
msgid "Begin!"
msgstr ""

The last little bit is the stuff we have to translate. I had to modify the stuff at the top to change the ENCODING and CHARSET. I changed both of these to utf-8, so my file now reads:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR ORGANIZATION
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2007-06-19 17:15+EDT\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: utf-8\n"
"Generated-By: pygettext.py 1.5\n"


#: kuku.py:500
msgid "Begin!"
msgstr ""

Now I moved kuku.pot to ./locale . Then for each language I want to localize to, I create subdirectories within ./locale according to their language codes. Within each of these subdirectories, I create subdirectories called LC_MESSAGES. For know I am using english and swahili, so my directory structure looks like

locale/
  kuku.pot
  en/
    LC_MESSAGES/
  sw/
    LC_MESSAGES/

Now we do translations. I copied kuku.pot into ./locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/kuku.po and ./locale/sw/LC_MESSAGES/kuku.po, and performed the translations:

#./locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/kuku.po
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR ORGANIZATION
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2007-06-19 17:15+EDT\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: utf-8\n"
"Generated-By: pygettext.py 1.5\n"


#: kuku.py:500
msgid "Begin!"
msgstr "Begin!"

#./locale/sw/LC_MESSAGES/kuku.po
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR ORGANIZATION
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2007-06-19 17:15+EDT\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: utf-8\n"
"Generated-By: pygettext.py 1.5\n"


#: kuku.py:500
msgid "Begin!"
msgstr "Kuanza!"

Now my directory structure looks like

locale/
  kuku.pot
  en/
    LC_MESSAGES/
      kuku.po
  sw/
    LC_MESSAGES/
      kuku.po

One last step before we are ready to go. We need to make the binary files used by gettext. We do that with msgfmt.py:

cd <project path>/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/
python <path to your python distribution>/Tools/i18n/msgfmt.py kuku.po 
cd <project path>/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/
python <path to your python distribution>/Tools/i18n/msgfmt.py kuku.po

This creates binary .mo files, and now my directory structure looks like:

locale/
  kuku.pot
  en/
    LC_MESSAGES/
      kuku.po
      kuku.mo
  sw/
    LC_MESSAGES/
      kuku.po
      kuku.mo

To add new languages, we need to add a subdirectory for each language, perform the translations, create the .mo files, and add the relevant code in the application to select the language.

Resources

These are the two docs that I used to learn about i18n (with no prior knowledge). Read the WxPython reference first, and instead of using the mki18n.py file mentioned on the WkPython page, use the tools in the python standard distribution: pygettext.py and msgfmt.py.

Python Reference

WxPython i18n