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Introduction#

SUMO uses the gettext tooling to maintain a list of translated strings. The main work of translation is done by the community using Weblate. Every change at Weblate creates a commit into their clone of the SUMO repository which will be merged (currently manually, see below) into the main line after review. The Weblate repository gets updated automatically by a webhook installed by Eclipse at the main repo.

So if you want to add translation strings open an account at Weblate and start.

Marking translatable strings#

In the code every string which needs translation should be marked with the TL macro like this: TL("String to be translated"). We decided against the often used _ macro for readability.

The macro is defined in src/utils/common/MsgHandler.h which needs to be included (but often already is). If you have strings which are concatenated using + you should replace them using the TLF macro like TLF("The vehicle '%' has a message.", id) or one of the formatting versions of our WRITE_MESSAGE macros. So instead of WRITE_MESSAGE("The vehicle '" + id "' has a problem."); use WRITE_MESSAGEF(TL("The vehicle '%' has a problem."), id); (this works for WRITE_WARNING and WRITE_ERROR as well).

Please be aware that changing a translatable string in the code (even if you just fix a typo) will invalidate (i.e. remove) all translations. This does not mean you should not do it, you should just review the changes to the translation files as well. In case you want to keep the translations but fix a typo in the translatable string, please consider using our helper scripts for that task.

The translations should not be applied to debug and developer messages. This includes everything in src/foreign, src/libsumo, src/libtraci, src/traci_testclient and unittest.

Context#

The same string may have different meanings in different contexts or may need a shorter version due to limited space in the GUI. For this reason the TLC macro can be used, where the context can be mentioned: It contains first the context and then the string as parameters like in TLC("Simulation", "Stop"). Below is the list of context identifiers currently in use:

  • Simulation
  • Labels

Using translations#

Translations are enabled by default. The needed gettext tools and internationalization library are probably already installed on Linux. If not use the equivalent of sudo apt install gettext on your system. It is also a good idea to do sudo apt install locales-all to make sure all the needed locales are on your system. For Windows we have everything in the SUMOLibraries.

The translation strings are split into three files for each language residing in $SUMO_HOME/data/po, one for GUI stuff, one for the command line applications and one for the python tools. While it is possible to edit these files directly, it is discouraged to avoid merge conflicts with the Weblate translations. These files still need to be compiled to be usable. Currently this is done manually by calling tools/build_config/i18n.py. This script also does a full scan of the src dir and checks for new translatable strings. If it finds some, all existing po files will be updated accordingly.

Testing translations#

All SUMO binaries understand the --language option which behaves exactly like the environment variable LANGUAGE as described in the gettext documentation. So for testing turkish, you set --language tr. Please be aware that by default the C locale is activated which suppresses all translations. If you want the binaries to respect the environment variable LANGUAGE you can do so by using --language= (setting --language to an empty string).

New language#

If you want to add a new language either open an issue with your request or run tools/build_config/i18n.py -l <lang> and make a pull request with the resulting po files.

For developers#

The translated strings from Weblate are not pushed automatically to our github repo because automatic pushing is generally a bad idea and weblate does not have the rights. If you want to merge the commits in weblate into the main github you have to do the following in your local git clone of SUMO:

git pull  # make sure you are up to date and on the target branch (usually main)
git remote add weblate https://hosted.weblate.org/git/eclipse-sumo/sumo-gui-netedit/  # add Weblate repo (only necessary once)
git fetch weblate  # get new commits
git merge weblate/main

Then you should review the changes and git push afterwards.

Change original strings#

Changing the translatable string directly in the source code will invalidate the translation because the original string is used as a key in the .po translation files. By default, the obsolete translations will remain in the .po file but won't appear in the Weblate anymore. If the original string does not change its meaning, it is preferable to use the python script tools/build_config/updateMessageIDs.py instead (see updateMessageIDs.py help). The script tools/build_config/obsoleteTranslations.py (see obsoleteTranslations.py help) can be used to print the obsolete translations and optionally remove them completely from the .po files.