Programmers Translation Workflow

Background

Translatable texts within TVH are divided into 3 areas:

Text used within the application to describe object properties and values, etc. Text used within the main web user interface (WebUI). Text used within the 'Help' system of the WebUI (Documentation).

All text is entered in English into the program/documentation source files. For successful translation, the English text also must be added to the master language translation files.

There are 3 master translation files.

intl/tvheadend.pot intl/js/tvheadend.js.pot intl/docs/tvheadend.doc.pot

These master translation .pot files are converted into various language-specific po files as described here.

After translation, the language-specific .po files are used to build TVH. For example (where XX represents the language code):

intl/tvheadend.XX.po intl/js/tvheadend.js.XX.po intl/docs/tvheadend.doc.XX.po

This system is very similar to GNU tettext where a msgid tag contains the original English text and a msgstr tag contains the translated text.

msgid "Yes" msgstr "Oui

Programmer Usage

Within program code written in the 'C' programming language, the N_() macro is used to identify English text that can be translated into another language. The translated text is returned at run time based on the user's linguistic preferences.

Within the WebUI code written in the 'JavaScript' programming language, the _() function is used to indicate that translation is required.

All of the help system documentation files are converted from markdown text files into C static arrays that also eventually use the N_() function before display.

If no translation is available, the original English text passed to N_() or _()will be returned.

Build Process

Although there is a single unified build process, translations for each programming language or area referred to above are described separately for clarity.

The list of languages to be processed is determined by the LANGUAGES_ALL variable set in Makefile.common.

Build Process - Main Application (C code) and WebUI Help (Markdown)

Called from the main Makefile, the script support/poc.py processes the intl/tvheadend.XX.po (main application) and intl/docs/tvheadend.doc.XX.po (documentation) files and produces a consolidated tvh_locale_inc.c file containing all of the text as static C char arrays plus an index array. This file will be compiled into the final application binary.

Build Process - WebUI (JavaScript)

Called from Makefile.webui, the script, support/pojs.py converts all of the individual intl/js/tvheadend.js.XX.po files into individual webui/static/intl/tvh.XX.js.gz files. These files are loaded dynamically at runtime by the WebUI based on the user's linguistic preferences.