24th Oct, 2009

Pepipopum – automatically translate PO files with Google Translate

If you’ve ever worked on localizing an application or website, you may be familiar with the .po files used with GNU gettext and compatible tools.

I’ve written a script which can take a .po file and translate any untranslated strings with Google Translate. This may not be a ‘release quality’ translation, but does speed up the job of a real translator, who can simply proof read and correct the machine-translated entries.

See it in action here: http://pepipopum.dixo.net

I’ve released the source under the Affero GPL too, so you can tweak or host it yourself. The version hosted above does have a one second delay between translations, so if you want to go faster you’re encouraged to do exactly that!

Hope someone else finds it useful.

Responses

I’ve made a few fixes to correct some mangling of placeholders like %1 in translated strings, and also made the direct output appear as it is generated, rather than waiting until the entire translation is complete.

Hi Paul. You did a great job. I tried to translate my plugin (great plugin by the way http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/welcome-announcement). It works fine except for accentuated characters and ‘ . Do you have any suggestion?

I like your translator, although it is slower (but more correct) than
http://translate.umpirsky.com

One suggestion: Add option to mark all automatically translated strings as fuzzy, to remind the user to check them manually.

I’ve contacted JMbamba and have his po file, so will see what I can do to improve things.

@Samir, do you mean as a comment, or in the string itself? Also, you can make it faster by installing it yourself – the version I’m hosting has an artificial delay.

Simply in output text for all translated lines (so not for the lines which originaly have some content) before the English line to put one
#, fuzzy
statement. You can turn on/off this option using one check box.

I know that the delay is artificial.

Hi!
I was wondering if maybe your script is available from anywhere else since both links seem to be down.

Thanks!

Hi! Any news about the broken links?

I am interested in the project myself!

Regards
Mike

Sorry about the service being offline – I had it running on a spare server we’ve since taken offline. It will be back up shortly!

Thanks for the source!

This is a wonderful idea you have here.

What license is the source under?

My (short!) post does mention it’s licensed under the Affero GPL :)

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