DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / po4a / po4a-translate.1p.en
PO4A-TRANSLATE(1p) Po4a Tools PO4A-TRANSLATE(1p)

po4a-translate - convert a PO file back to documentation format

po4a-translate -f fmt -m master.doc -p XX.po -l XX.doc

(XX.doc is the output, all others are inputs)

The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.

The po4a-translate script is in charge of converting the translation (which was done in a PO file) back into the documentation format. The provided PO file should be the translation of the POT file which was produced by po4a-gettextize(1).

Format of the documentation you want to handle. Use the --help-format option to see the list of available formats.
Add a file to the resulting file (to put translator's name or a section "About this translation", for example). The first line of the file to insert should be a PO4A header indicating where it should be added (see section HOWTO add extra text to translations in po4a(7)).
Charset of the addenda. Note that all the addenda should be in the same charset.
File containing the master document to translate.
Charset of the file containing the document to translate.
File where the localized (translated) document should be written.
Charset of the file containing the localized document.
File from which the message catalog should be read.
Extra option(s) to pass to the format plugin. See the documentation of each plugin for more information about the valid options and their meanings. For example, you could pass '-o tablecells' to the AsciiDoc parser, while the text parser would accept '-o tabs=split'.
Minimal threshold for translation percentage to keep (i.e. write) the resulting file (default: 80). I.e. by default, files have to be translated at least at 80% to get written.
Column at which we should wrap the resulting file.
Show a short help message.
List the documentation formats understood by po4a.
Display the version of the script and exit.
Increase the verbosity of the program.
Output some debugging information.
Specify the reference format. Argument type can be one of never to not produce any reference, file to only specify the file without the line number, counter to replace line number by an increasing counter, and full to include complete references (default: full).

Argument can be followed by a comma and either wrap or nowrap keyword. References are written by default on a single line. The wrap option wraps references on several lines, to mimic gettext tools (xgettext and msgmerge). This option will become the default in a future release, because it is more sensible. The nowrap option is available so that users who want to keep the old behavior can do so.

Specify how the po file should be wrapped. This gives the choice between either files that are nicely wrapped but could lead to git conflicts, or files that are easier to handle automatically, but harder to read for humans.

Historically, the gettext suite has reformatted the po files at the 77th column for cosmetics. This option specifies the behavior of po4a. If set to a numerical value, po4a will wrap the po file after this column and after newlines in the content. If set to newlines, po4a will only split the msgid and msgstr after newlines in the content. If set to no, po4a will not wrap the po file at all. The wrapping of the reference comments is controlled by the --porefs option.

Note that this option has no impact on how the msgid and msgstr are wrapped, ie on how newlines are added to the content of these strings.

To add some extra content to the generated document beside what you translated (like the name of the translator, or an "About this translation" section), you should use the --addendum option.

The first line of the addendum must be a header indicating where to put it in the document (it can be before or after a given part of the document). The rest of the file will be added verbatim to the resulting file without further processing.

Note that if po4a-translate fails to add one of the given files, it discards the whole translation (because the missing file could be the one indicating the author, what would prevent the users to contact him to report bugs in the translation).

The header has a pretty rigid syntax. For more information on how to use this feature and how it works, please refer to the po4a(7) man page.

po4a-gettextize(1), po4a-normalize(1), po4a-updatepo(1), po4a(7)

 Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>
 Nicolas François <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net>
 Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

Copyright 2002-2020 by SPI, inc.

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of GPL (see the COPYING file).

2023-01-03 Po4a Tools