L10N FAQ

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Fedora L10N Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some FAQs about the Localization Project.

General Questions

What does "L10N" means?

L10N is an abbreviation of the term "Localization" by means of a so-called numeronym, a way of replacing the middle letters of a word (in case 'ocalizatio') by naming the number of letters between the first and last letter of that word (in case 10): Localization.

Should I translate legal notices?

No. You must never do that. The exact wording of the legal notices is very important and a translation not approved by lawyers is very risky. Red Hat is the legal representative and primary sponsor of the Fedora Project and does not have the resources to cross check every single translation. Just leave the original English notice in tact when it covers legal matters.

Where do I report issues or feature requests?

• Issues or Feature requests specific to Fedora Infrastructure should be reported to [1]

e.g. XYZ package is not available for Translation Submission or Statistics.

• Issues or Feature requests specific to Transifex should be reported to [2].

e.g. Statistics should show last committer information as well on the status page, Sorting of statistics should be available.

The fastest way of getting things done is to approach FLP-admin group via Matrix #l10n:fedoraproject.org^{(other clients|?)}.

Website Questions

The website of the Fedora Localization Project is http://translate.fedoraproject.org/.

• It is maintained by the L10N project, usually by Dimitris Glezos and Piotr Drąg.

Where are issues and requests for a website of the Translation Project reported? (#bugs)

The best place to report requests and issues about the Localization-specific websites, is Bugzilla, L10n/Website component. Here's a quick query of existing website reports.

Before opening a new bug report, please take a look at the above query to see if there's an existing report opened. It sometimes help to ask in #l10n:fedoraproject.org^{(other clients|?)} if there's a known issue at that exact moment. If not, please open a bug report describing what's wrong with the service in clarity. Include the nature of the problem, the module/branch combination, the time (in UTC) it happened and your Fedora username. If you suspect it might be a problem with the particular file you are uploading or the target file, include that information as well.

If the issue is about Transifex as a software like feature requests and general problems not specific to the Fedora instance, please use the upstream ticketing system of Transifex .

How do I create a new team? (#new-team)

See L10N Maintainer on how to become a maintainer of a new language.

To add your team, create a bug report on l10n-requests. Include language, your name and FAS account, e-mail address, and URL to team's website and mailing list, if they exist.

How do I create a Bugzilla component for my language? (#bugzilla-team)

We have a separate Bugzilla component for every language, in order for bug reports to reach the correct people (ie. the ones that can fix them). We maintain these entries in an owners.list file on our VCS. You can find it in the L10n CVS, at /cvs/l10n/owners/. Each organized language group should have an entry there.

For more information, refer to L10N Maintainer .

Make sure the entry you are adding references an existing Bugzilla account. If needed, create one first.

My file is 100% but when I test the application I still see English strings! (#missing-strings)

This wasn't a question, by the way.

Nevermind. The following might have gone wrong:

• The strings in question have not been marked for translation by the developer, hence they haven't been included in the POT file, and thus not in the PO file. He needs to use gettext on them.
• The source files of these strings have not been marked for inclusion, in the intltool case.
• The POT file of Transifex is not up to date. The component page includes the date when the POT file has been produced. If this is more than a few hours in the past, please notify the admins, otherwise it should be OK.
• The PO file you translated was not msgmerged. In this case Transifex will show a statistic less than 100% (since it auto-merges the files). You need to acquire the file from Tx or msgmerge it with the POT file yourself.

My PO file is 100% but that doesn't show up on the page. What's up? (#100-percent)

There are a number of reasons this would happen, but here are the most common ones.

• The statistics are not updated on-the-fly but on a scheduled base -- you might need to wait until the next run of the update script. See #live .
• Most likely the PO file you submitted needed an msgmerge first, because it didn't contain the latest strings from the POT file. Let's say you checked out the PO file from the Version Control System (VCS), translated it 100% and committed it back. Before calculating the statistics, Transifex does an msgmerge on the PO file with the POT.

How do I add a module to Transifex? (#add-transifex)

To enable translators send contributions to your project through Transifex, you need to have a special VCS account for Transifex. The Fedora Infrastructure-side details are described at Translations_Infrastructure_SOP.

Other questions

I'm a developer, how can I make .desktop files translatable?

Take a look at this email on fedora-trans-list.

When checking in/out, I get a "Permission denied" (publickey,keyboard-interactive) error (#ssh-key-denied)

Most of the cases, this is a problem with SSH keys. When a user creates a new account, we associate an SSH key with it. When a new account is created, the user is requested to upload the public part of her SSH key (located in ~/.ssh/ of your PC), and this key is used to identify the user. This way is more secure than using a simple password. If you can't authenticate to cvs.fedoraproject.org, then the SSH key of the user on the system you are using doesn't have the same SSH key as the one we have on our servers, associated with your username.

If you have changed your SSH key recently, please visit Edit your Fedora account and upload your new SSH key.

If you haven't changed your SSH key recently, make sure the system and user account you are using has your SSH keys (eg. copy them from your other PC).

Is the section of export regulations shown at the bottom of the fedoraproject.org/get-fedora page translatable?

No. This is purposely set up as non-translatable. Please refer to Non-translatable export regulations?.

When is the merge happened for POT/POs?

Straight after String Freeze, the developers will merge latest strings of software for the translators. It is same for documentation, the authors will merge latest strings of each document after their String Freeze. Software, Beta Release Notes, GA Release Notes and other guides have different String Freezes, and those are scheduled in "Translation Task List" for each release, which can be found under "Detailed Schedules" section in Schedule page.

If some strings change past string freeze, how do I request a string freeze breakage?

Email the [3] mailing list!

What if I overwrite a wrong file?

There can be two possibilities: 1. You have overwritten wrong file in your own locale: you should locate the previous version of the overwritten .po file from http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/ and replace the wrongly updated file with this file.

2. You have overwritten file which belongs to some other language: in this case, you have to send an e-mail to the mailing list about this immediately, locate the correct file of that language from the http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/ and replace the wrongly updated file with this file.

Even though these are measures to correct mistake, we strongly advice you to take extra care while submitting the translations via Transifex and make sure that you are uploading file in proper location under proper locale.