plonewars.com

locales

Most translations should now be put in the locales directory of
your product or package. This directory must be registered in zcml
before it is picked up on Zope startup. So in your configure.zcml
add:

<configure
    xmlns:i18n="http://namespaces.zope.org/i18n">
    <i18n:registerTranslations directory="locales" />
</configure>

The locales directory differs a bit from the i18n directory. i18n has
for example:

i18n/mydomain.pot
i18n/mydomain-nl.po
i18n/mydomain-de.po

In locales that should be:

locales/mydomain.pot
locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po
locales/de/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po

You can rebuild the .pot file with:

i18ndude rebuild-pot --pot locales/mydomain.pot --create mydomain .

and you sync the .po files with:

i18ndude sync --pot locales/mydomain.pot locales/*/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po

Domain plone

If you want to add translations to the plone domain you could add
locales/plone.pot and locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/plone.po (or
locales/plone-mydomain.pot and
locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/plone-mydomain.po if you want). That
works: your translations for the plone domain are then available. But
now the default translations for the plone domain (so those from
PloneTranslations) are overridden. This is because your translations
for the plone domain are picked up first by the zope translation
machinery; the PlacelessTranslationService that normally loads the
translations from PloneTranslations then gets ignored for the plone
domain. So half your site is in English even though your browser is
set to Dutch.

So extra translations for the plone domain should not be done in the
locales directory. You can still put them in the i18n
directory though. In Plone 3.5 this is likely to change.

i18n

If you put an i18n dir in a package, it will be ignored. Doing
i18n:registerTranslations for this directory does not work.
You can only use an i18n dir in a product.

GenericSetup profiles

Several .xml files in the profiles can handle i18n as well. For
instance in a types definition like
types/JobPerformanceInterview.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<object name="JobPerformanceInterview"
   meta_type="Factory-based Type Information with dynamic views"
   xmlns:i18n="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/i18n"
   i18n:domain="plone">
 <property name="title"
           i18n:translate="">Job performance interview</property>
</object>

The i18n:domain should be plone and not for instance
mydomain as these translations are used in templates of plone
itself. In fact, I think that the only use for having these i18n
commands in the .xml files is that they can then be extracted by
i18ndude (version 3.0 I think, which is best installed in a
workingenv).

Compiling .po files

.po files in i18n are compiled on zope startup time by the
PlacelessTranslationService. With compiling I mean: turning them into
.mo files so they are usable by zope. This automatic compiling
does not happen .po files in packages. So it is better to compile
those files yourself. You can do that like this:

# Compile po files
for lang in $(find locales -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d); do
    if test -d $lang/LC_MESSAGES; then
        msgfmt -o $lang/LC_MESSAGES/${PRODUCTNAME}.mo $lang/LC_MESSAGES/${PRODUCTNAME}.po
    fi
done

Conclusions

• For both products and packages: put the translations for your domain
  in the locales directory.
• Put extra translations for the plone domain in an i18n directory
  in a product for the Products dir.