One of the great things about being a programmer is that when I have a problem, it’s pretty easy to solve it myself1.
I recently began to seriously support i18n (internationalization) in the Countdown Timer. It’s actually a pretty slick system. Everywhere I have some text that’s output in the plugin, I wrap it in a WordPress defined function that handles the translation. Then I generate a PO file using poEdit and make a MO (which is just a binary/machine object file of the PO file, which is human readable).
The issue is, if someone wanted to translate the PO file, they’d have to download poEdit, figure out how to use it, grab the PO file, translate it, make the MO file, and then send the MO file to me. This works pretty well if the users is a computer guru. But that’s not often the case.
I was hoping there would be an online PO translator, but I couldn’t find one. So I decided to make my own. Thus I present, in the form of clever titles that mash two words together, phPo Translator (or just phPo for short).
I basically wrote the code over lunch today and then decided that I should version control it. So I threw it up on Google Code, which I knew about but had never, up until this point, actually used.
Google Code is simply amazing. It took less then a minute to register and it uses SVN, which I already have installed on my computer. So I upload the code, create the tag, and away we go!
In any event, you can:
See it in action: Translate afdn_countdownTimer.po
Download phPo Translator v0.1.1
View phPo Translator Google Code page
Granted, most of my problems are probably caused because I am a programmer ↩
that was a really well written post Ferg.
*grin* your website shows up in the top-10 for “po google translate”. Have you thought about integrating automatic translation? I’ve been surprised about the quality lately.
@Henk Poley:
It would be nice to have automatic translation, but I can’t confirm how well Google’s API translation would work.
hello , its a very cool and nice script, i was searching for a online based po editor , and i found your little script. But why user cant DIRECTLY edit the po file online ? instead of mail a lot of translation strings.
yeah, this is the closest to what I’m looking for and yet it’s far far away from an online po editor. Do you happen to have any plans to continue with this project? Thanks for the script, though!
@Markus
I do want to continue with the project, especially since I still use it. I just haven’t had the time recently (I’m finishing up my engineer degree).
I thought it would be great to integrate something like that with the Zend_Translate gettext adapter and extend it in a way that for admin users, the translations are directly saved to the po file while for a lower users the translations would be stored in a db table and commited to the po by the admin. What I would like to achieve is to give my customers the possibility to translate their own website contents online while still using gettext.
Launchpad has a great internal tool to translate po files online. Very strong!
The best thing is that Launchpad will be open source by next month.
http://translate.umpirsky.com/ will translate your po file to any choosen language 🙂
Although the translation is not perfect (no machine makes a 100% accurate translation), it really saves a lot of time. Thank you very much!
How one can install and us it? Is it a WordPress plugin?
@Sourena,
It’s a PHP script that’s not related to WordPress at all.
This is interesting too! An automatic .po(t) file translator for free and very robust (does not touch html code, escaped characters and so forth):
http://pepipopum.dixo.net/index.php
It uses Google Translator API to translate automatically your provided po file!
if you’re looking for an online .po editor, this is a pretty neat one – http://poeditor.com/