Summary

This page is a proposal for a workflow to be able to translate Django documentation through po files (and ​Transifex platform). See also #18108.

Translation storage

Proposal is to store pot files and po translation files in a separate repository (e.g. django-docs-translations). Pot files only take up 4Mb, so considering that for each language, you add ~7Mb, this is too much for the Django main repository.

Workflow

1. A modification is done in the /docs dir of Django's repo.

2. New pots are automatically built for stable documentation during each documentation build (update_docs command of djangoproject.com) and made available at the URL https://docs.djangoproject.com/pots/<domain>.pot.

3. Transifex downloads new pot files once or twice a day.

4. Translators translate strings on Transifex.

5. At defined times, translations are fetched from Transifex and pushed to django-docs-translations/translations/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES/*.po.

6. Translated docs build:
   • make translations in django-docs-translations generates .mo files
   • create a symbolic link django/docs/locale pointing to django-docs-translations/translations
   • make html LANGUAGE=<locale> in django/docs
   • Built HTML files are pushed online

Issues

• Some strings are not translatable through po files currently. See ​https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/docs/_ext/djangodocs.py#L259
• Search should probably be limited in the current language (one search index per language)