Internationalization and Translation

The OpenStack I18n team is responsible to make OpenStack ubiquitously accessible to people of all language backgrounds, by providing high quality translations. It is composed of a core team which manages the translation platform and process, and various translation teams who translate OpenStack documents, OpenStack Dashboard and messages into different languages.

Translation Platform

We use an Open Source development approach to translate OpenStack. There is a translation server built on top of OpenStack infrastructure supporting OpenStack translation. People who are interested in translation can log on the translation server and find English strings in small pieces that need to be translated.

Those English strings are extracted from OpenStack projects and documents, and organised by projects and versions. Translated strings in various of languages will finally be merged as a whole and saved in OpenStack repositories. A number of automatic jobs support the extraction of English strings, upload to the translation server, and download the translated strings. More details can be found here: Translation infrastructure.

Note that the OpenStack source language, the language used inside OpenStack projects, is always US English.

Translation of Documents

Translation of OpenStack documents are treated the same as translation of Python projects. The whole English documents are sliced into small pieces for translation and stored in PO templates and send to the translation server. When translation is done, HTML documents are built. More details can be found here: Documentation I18n tools.

All the document projects in translation server can be found here: Documentation translation projects.

Translation of Repositories

To enable translation of repositories, the translation infrastructure needs to be setup as documented in translation server setup.

The process for translation is basically the following:

1. After each merge of a repository, all strings that should be translated, will be sent to the translation server.
2. Translators translate strings using the translation server.
3. Every morning after 6:00 UTC, the CI infrastructure checks for files that are translated and creates a change and submits it to review for the repository. Files are considered translated if at least 75 per cent of the messages are translated.
4. The change gets reviewed and merges into the repository.

Here is a list of all open proposed translations.

Translation start by default on the master branch. The i18n team creates stable branches for certain projects once a stable branch is created in git, and then translations are done on the stable branch on the translation server as well and synced with the stable git branch.

Translation priorities

Generally, translation plans will be published in the homepage of translation server, where you can get the current translation priorities.

Since there are many server projects, client projects, and manuals to translate, the OpenStack I18n team will discuss which files to focus on. Any project team can enable translations for their project but this will not result automatically in translators working on the files. Project teams can discuss with the OpenStack I18n team how their project fits into the overall focus.

See also

• i18n Team page in the OpenStack wiki
• Translation infrastructure
• Translation server
• List of open proposed translations
• Translation server setup