Translation setup

Nextcloud’s translation system is powered by Transifex. To start translating sign up and enter a group. If your community app should be translated by the Nextcloud community on Transifex just follow the setup section below.

Translation tool

Note

The tool-based translation currently only supports repositories hosted on github.com. If your app is hosted elsewhere, you can try to follow the Manual translation instead.

The translation tool scrapes the source code for method calls to t() or n() to extract the strings that should be translated. If you check in minified JS code for example then those method names are also quite common and could cause wrong extractions. For this reason we allow to specify a list of files that the translation tool will not scrape for strings. You simply need to add a file named .l10nignore into the root folder of your app and specify the files one per line:

# compiled vue templates
js/bruteforcesettings.js

Setup of the transifex sync

Transifex configuration .tx/config

To setup the transifex sync within the Nextcloud community you need to add first the transifex config to your app folder at .tx/config (please replace MYAPP with your apps id):

[main]
host     = https://www.transifex.com
lang_map = hu_HU: hu, nb_NO: nb, sk_SK: sk, th_TH: th, ja_JP: ja, bg_BG: bg, cs_CZ: cs, fi_FI: fi

[o:nextcloud:p:nextcloud:r:{{APPID}}]
file_filter = translationfiles/<lang>/{{APPID}}.po
source_file = translationfiles/templates/{{APPID}}.pot
source_lang = en
type        = PO

Then create a folder l10n and a file l10n/.gitkeep to create an empty folder which later holds the translations.

Branch selection .tx/backport

The bot will run every night and only push commits to the following branches branch once there is an update to the translation:

  • main

  • master

  • stableX (X being the recent 3 versions of Nextcloud Server)

You can overwrite this list by creating a file .tx/backport in your repository with the following content:

develop stable

That would sync the translations for the branches (main and master are added automatically):

  • main

  • master

  • develop

  • stable

Excluding files .l10nignore

Add one more file called .l10nignore in root of the repository and the files and folders to ignore for translations. This should be used to exclude files that create false-positive translations, such as:

  • Compiled JavaScript files js/

  • 3rd-party PHP dependencies vendor/

  • Non-shipped files and documentation docs/

Validate source strings

After finishing the setup, you can validate the translation source strings which outlines some common mistakes. Clone the nextcloud/docker-ci repository and afterwards run the following script:

bash translations/validateSyncSetup.sh Owner Repository

Repository permissions

Now the GitHub account @nextcloud-bot needs to get write access to your repository. You can invite it from your repository settings:

https://github.com/<user-name>/<repo-name>/settings/access

After sending the invitation, please open a ticket using the “Request translations” template.

Attention

In general you should enable the protected branches feature for default and stable branches. If you do that, you need to grant the @nextcloud-bot admin permissions and allow administrators to bypass the protection. This feature however is only possible for repositories owned by organizations, not in repositories owned by individuals! You can create your own organization

If you need help just open a ticket with the request and we can also guide you through the steps.

Manual translation

If Transifex is not the right choice or the app is not accepted for translation, generate the gettext strings by yourself by executing our translation tool in the app folder:

cd /srv/http/nextcloud/apps/myapp
translationtool.phar create-pot-files

The translation tool requires gettext, installable via:

apt-get install gettext

The above tool generates a template that can be used to translate all strings of an app. This template is located in the folder translationfiles/template/ with the name myapp.pot. It can be used by your favored translation tool such as Poedit. It then creates a .po file. The .po file needs to be placed in a folder named like the language code with the app name as filename - for example translationfiles/es/myapp.po. After this step the tool needs to be invoked to transfer the po file into our own fileformat that is more easily readable by the server code:

translationtool.phar convert-po-files

Now the following folder structure is available:

myapp/l10n
|-- es.js
|-- es.json
myapp/translationfiles
|-- es
|   |-- myapp.po
|-- templates
    |-- myapp.pot

You then just need the .json and .js files for a working localized app.