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I've written before about the strange phenomenon surrounding translators of open-source materials, who, though by most accounts often very technical, have no technology intersection with their commercial counterparts. Virtually none of the tools used by open-source translators are used by commercial translators, and vice versa. There are exceptions, of course. The open-source translation environment tool OmegaT, built mostly for and by professional commercial translators, is used by some open-source translators, and there are a handful of commercial translators using tools like Virtaal, Pootle, and Poedit. But the crossover is the exception rather than the rule.
There are reasons for this discrepancy. One is that the commercial translation environment tools are, well, commercial, cost a lot, and are therefore not accessible for the mostly volunteer open-source translators. (A few years ago I convinced the developers of Heartsome to give away their tool for free to Firefox translators, who had no tool whatsoever. It was a smart move for both their publicity and their influence among those folks.) Second, most commercial TEnTs used to run only on Windows, which was not particularly popular among many connoisseurs/translators of open-source software products. This points, thirdly, to the cultural rift between the two groups, one that in my opinion is unfortunate. (It's too bad that this won't be read by many open-source translators since this will appear only in the paid Premium edition. . . . )
There is one other reason as well, though, and that is different file formats. Many open-source projects are not based on the commercially-used file formats that yours and mine are based on, but on ones that many of us have rarely if ever heard of. The formats that particularly come to mind are the GNU gettext .po and .pot files.
I remember many years ago when I wrote the documentation for Déjà Vu, I had to document that particular filter and I was stunned. I had never seen a file like that, nor did I know what those files were even good for! Fortunately, one of the few translators who "lives in both worlds" took me under his wing, sent me sample files, and explained to me what those files were about. Eight or nine years later, I now have to work in projects based on .po files -- something that is becoming increasingly popular, especially in newly released software products with developers who originally came from the open-source corner.
So, what are these files? Translatable language resource files used in the free GNU gettext concept for translating software and documentation. GNU gettext is the de facto standard in many open-source projects, and it works with a large variety of programming languages.
In many ways, .po files are really cool. Long before XLIFF existed or .ttx had become somewhat of a standard, these bilingual translation files were the actual files to be translated and could themselves become translation memories for other projects. All this was made possible by the above-mentioned Poedit, an open-source translation editor. You might have noticed that I don't call it a translation environment tool -- that would be saying too much. It has the definite feel of a Notepad compared with Word or OpenOffice (no fuzzy matching, no spell-check, no concordance searches, no terminology components, etc.).
There are some things that can be done very well with it. One is to turn .pot files (the template files that are directly derived from the software) into the bilingual .po files, and the other is to compile the translated .po file in its compiled .mo version -- both extremely welcome features when you receive .pot files and are asked to deliver translated .mo files (duh!).
As far as translation goes, it's interesting to use Poedit for experience's sake to use for one small project, but you will quickly want to go back to your good old complete translation environment. Which tools support this format? Here is a list of TEnTs that directly support it (reader Heidi J. Golicz-Miranda asked me recently for a clarification on this):
- Déjà Vu
- Heartsome
- Swordfish
- SDL Passolo (a localization tool), and, not surprisingly,
- OmegaT
- plus a number of other open-source tools that tend to have the same limitations as Poedit.
This is great if you have one of these tools for your ongoing project, but what if you don't?
Enter Rainbow, the tool that will do what no other can, the tool that will go the extra mile, the tool whose developer, Yves Savourel, does all those things that others are too lazy to do don't have time to do.
As you can see on its wiki page, Rainbow allows you to do a multitude of localization-related things. Its most important function may be the preparation of translation packets for XLIFF, OmegaT, or Trados RTF for a great number of otherwise not supported or badly supported file formats (among which is .po).
To convert your .po files to either XLIFF or Trados RTF where the non-translatable text is protected with the Trados tw4winExternal style (see the article on PrepTags in this newsletter), you'll need to (download, install, and)
- start Rainbow,
- select Input> Add Document to insert files and select the .po file(s),
- make sure that the correct filter is selected by right-clicking on the file(s) and selecting Edit Document Properties,
- select Utilites> Translation Package Creation and choose either Generic XLIFF or Original + RTF Layer,
- select a location on the Package Location tab, and
- press Execute.
You will now have a folder structure that contains a work folder in which you can find the files that need to be processed with the TEnT of your choice. (And if your .po file was already partly translated, courtesy of Yves, a translation memory exchange TMX file would have also been created with that content right above the work folder.)
Once you're done with the translation,
- save the files back into the work folder,
- start Rainbow again,
- select Input> Add Document to insert files and select the manifest.xml file above the work folder,
- select the translated file(s),
- select Utilities> Translation Package Post-Processing, and
- select Execute.
You can now pick up your translated .po files in the done folder. And if you need to deliver .mo files, open them in Poedit and simply save them. In the default setting, Poedit will have created an .mo file for you.
(If you're thinking you'll never need to know all this, keep this in mind: Mubarak expected his 2011 to go a little differently than how it panned out, too. So keep these instructions in a safe place!)
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