Can I use the Launchpad translation service for my GitHub project?

Question

For historical reasons, the project I co-author is on GitHub and we feel comfortable with its development processes. Thus we don't particularly want to migrate the whole project to Launchpad and using bazaar.

Being good internet-citizens we want to provide our open-source application in as many languages as possible - we stumbled across whilst searching that Launchpad could provide such a service.

• https://help.launchpad.net/Translations

The above link gives lots of description on this service, but I need a concise - very brief - how to:

• get our translation file (package.pot) from GitHub into launchpad
• brief description how to kick off our project to be translated.
• pull back from launchpad any translation files (.po) that are generated by the wonderful translation team back into GitHub.

Does anybody have any practical experience do this that can help here?

Answer 1

Short answer: Yes, Launchpad can be used to manage translations for a project on github.

You can test launchpad's features with Launchpad Staging.

• Register your project on Launchpad. (Instructions can be found here.)
• Set up Launchpad to automatically import from Github. (Launchpad help page)
  Use https://launchpad.net/PROJECT/trunk/+setbranch to set up Launchpad to import automatically from Github.
• Set up translations. (Launchpad help page)
  Use https://translations.launchpad.net/PROJECT/trunk/+translations-settings to select what is to be imported. Translation templates alone, or along with existing translation files, can be imported.

How things work?

• You push to github repo you set as source in step 2.
• Launchpad periodically checks, and updates the bzr repository.
• It then scans for any .pot or .po files, and adds them to the translations import queue.
• After a short while, the strings appear as 'Needs translation' and can be translated like anything else on launchpad.

What about pushing back to Github?

Sorry, but I don't think Launchpad is capable of that. However, LP can be set up to commit the translation files to a bzr branch on LP. It also allows you to manually download the translation files. These options can be found in the translation settings page.