---
layout: default
title: Translation instructions
description: how to help translate TortoiseSVN
keywords: translation, instruction
lang: en
---


<div class="post">
    <h1 class="title">Translation instructions</h1>
    <div class="entry">
        <p>TortoiseSVN is still in development so the translation
        of all resources is also a work 'in progress'.</p>

        <h2>General</h2>
        <p>The TortoiseSVN project uses gettext PO (portable object)
        files for its translation. PO files are plain text, so you
        can even translate using a normal text editor. The only
        thing you have to take care of is that the editor can handle
        the UTF-8 charset. There is a wide range of tools out there
        that can handle and manipulate PO files.</p>
        <p>There are two ways to add to the translations in TortoiseSVN</p>
        <ul>
            <li>The new way using transifex.com</li>
            <li>The old manual way (deprecated)</li>
        </ul>

        <h3>Offline translation editing</h3>
        <p>No matter whether you follow the old or the new path, both ways allow you to edit your
            translations offline. We recommend that you use
            <a href="https://poedit.net/">poEdit</a> (Windows only) or
            <a href="https://virtaal.translatehouse.org/?id=virtaal/index">Virtaal</a> (Multi-platform).
        </p>

        <h3 id="thenewway">The new way using transifex.com</h3>
        <p>
            Visit <a href="https://transifex.com">transifex.com</a> and register an account there.
            After having done this, go to the <a href="https://explore.transifex.com/luebbe/tortoisesvn/">TortoiseSVN translation project</a>
            and request to join a language team of your choice.
        </p>
        <p>
            Transifex has a nice web interface. You can edit everything there, but you can also download
            the .po file, work offline using your preferred editor and upload the .po file to transifex again.
        </p>
        <p>
            We take care of synchronizing the translations between transifex.com and our repository.
        </p>

        <h3 id="theoldway">The old manual way (deprecated)</h3>

        <p>This description assumes that you use poEdit.</p>

        <h3>Getting started</h3>
        <p>If you want to implement a new language for TortoiseSVN
        do the following.</p>

        <ol>
            <li><p>Use TortoiseSVN (or any other SubVersion client) to
            check out:<br/>
            <a href="https://svn.osdn.net/svnroot/tortoisesvn/trunk/Languages">https://svn.osdn.net/svnroot/tortoisesvn/trunk/Languages</a>
            (You will get more than one file).</p>
            <p>Or point your browser to:<br/>
            <a href="https://osdn.net/projects/tortoisesvn/scm/svn/tree/head/trunk/Languages">https://osdn.net/projects/tortoisesvn/scm/svn/tree/head/trunk/Languages</a>,
            select <strong>Tortoise.pot</strong> and save this file
            to your local harddisk. Tortoise.pot is the portable
            object template (hence .pot) for the translation.</p>
            </li>
            <li>Rename Tortoise.pot to Tortoise_xx.po, where xx is
            your two letter ISO-639-1 language code. Look up your
            language code here:
            <a href="https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html">https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html</a>.
            <p>Please keep in mind that we would like to have as few
            translations as possible that cover as many languages
            as possible. We would not be very happy at having to
            maintain a (de_CH) Swiss German, (de_AT) Austrian German
            and (de_DE) German German translation. :-)<br/>
            But if it's necessary like in Chinese, sure go ahead.
            We are happy with simplified (zh_CN) and traditional
            (zh_TW) Chinese.</p>
            </li>
            <li>It would also be nice, if you sent us your four
            digit locale ID along with the file. The list of locale
            IDs as defined by Microsoft can be found here:
            <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx">https://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx</a>
            </li>
            <li>Now translate what you can using poEdit. If you are
            not sure with one or the other translation, mark it
            as <em>fuzzy</em>. You can enter a comment in poEdit to
            give some information about your thoughts to other
            translators.<br/>

            If you are not sure about the meaning of the original
            sentence ask on the list.
            </li>
            <li>Add a header with '#' comments to the PO file using
            a normal text editor that explains which language you
            translated and the terminology you used, like:<br/>
            <code><br/>
               #<br/>
               # German translations for TortoiseSVN<br/>
               # This file is distributed under the same license as the subversion package.<br/>
               #<br/>

               # Translation dictionary:<br/>
               #<br/>
               # argument    parameter<br/>
               # bogus      ungültig<br/>
               # checkout    auschecken (denglisch, ich weiss, aber akzeptabel)<br/>
               # client    Client, des Client<br/>

               # commit    Übertragen<br/>
               # item        Objekt<br/>
               # label      Marke / Markierung<br/>
            </code>
            </li>
            <li>Make sure your file is saved in UTF-8 encoding and
            that it does <strong>not</strong> begin with UTF-8 BOMs
            (Byte Order Marks)
            </li>
            <li>Send your Tortoise_xx.po to the mailing list
            (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tortoisesvn) or, if you have a
            <a href="https://osdn.net">OSDN account</a>,
            request commit access to the project via the translators
            mailing list, you may commit your translations directly
            into the TortoiseSVN repository.
            </li>
        </ol>

        <h3>Adding to an existing translation</h3>
        <ol>
            <li>Get hold of Tortoise.pot and the Tortoise_xx.po you
            want to improve
            </li>
            <li>Start poEdit with Tortoise_xx.po and select
            <cite>Update from .pot file</cite> from the "Catalog" Menu
            </li>
            <li>Select Tortoise.pot and wait until poEdit has
            finished merging the template and the current translation.
            </li>
            <li>The untranslated strings (and fuzzy translations)
            are always at the top of the list.
            </li>
            <li>Translate what you can and send the resulting PO
            file back to the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/g/tortoisesvn).
            </li>
        </ol>

        <h3>Important</h3>
        <p>Please pay special attention to cases where placeholders
        for variables like <code>%s</code> or <code>%d</code> appear in the original text.
        They have to appear in in the translation again. If the
        parameters are numbered, like <code>%1!s! files copied to %2!s!</code>,
        you may reverse the order in your translation if you need
        to do so to form a proper phrase in your language.</p>

        <h3>What now?</h3>
        <p>That's all you have to do. We'll take care of creating
        the resource dlls and installers for the different
        language packs.</p>

        <h3>Testing your translation</h3>
        <p>If you want to test the translations you made yourself,
        just wait for the next
        <a href="https://nightlybuilds.tortoisesvn.net/">nightly build</a>.<br/>

        The nightly build is done every night at 0:00 GMT+1. The
        Language Packs however are only built twice a week (on
        Sunday and Wednesday).
        The whole build takes about an hour. After the build is done,
        the installers (including the language packs) are uploaded
        for you to use.</p>
    </div>
</div>