[tor-bugs] #9959 [BridgeDB]: BridgeDB seems to be missing English translations

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#9959: BridgeDB seems to be missing English translations
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     Reporter:  isis     |      Owner:  isis
         Type:  defect   |     Status:  new
     Priority:  blocker  |  Milestone:
    Component:           |    Version:
  BridgeDB               |   Keywords:  bridgedb-ui, bridgedb-translations,
   Resolution:           |  translations, bridgedb-https
Actual Points:           |  Parent ID:
       Points:           |
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Comment (by aagbsn):

 Hi Isis --

 the default language is English, see: lib/bridgedb/I18n.py:6, which IIRC
 simply doesn't replace any strings (that is, it defaults to the original
 text) if the specified language is not found.

 I'd be glad to help you understand how the .pot/.po/.mo file work

 Firstly, all the templates (html) and code (py) files have some syntactic
 sugar wrapping any strings that you want to translate. It looks like _("A
 String I Want To Translate").

 The second thing you do is extract all of the above such strings and dump
 them into a .pot file. pybabel provides a set of message extractors, and
 these are added to setup.py along with a set of paths (message_extractors)
 that tell pybabel what sort of files it should hunt for strings in.

 when you invoke extract_messages" pybabel will automagically output a .pot
 file inside the project path under
 projectname/i18n/templates/projectname.pot (this path is static, I guess
 pybabel could use a patch if you want to change it).

 For each language you want to get a translation for, you need to
 init_catalog -l LANG for each of those languages. That will generate an
 untranslated .po file in the appropriate path. You're going to replace
 that file anyway with the one that transifex produces, though.

 The .pot template file is handed off to transifex/pootle/hand edited, and
 a set of corresponding .po files are produced, one for each translation.
 If you take a look at each of the files, you'll see they correspond to the
 template (remember, you should always redo the extract_messages command
 any time you add new strings for translation), where each extracted string
 has has the original string followed by the translated string. After these
 files are merged into the appropriate path (see init_catalog), you just
 need to compile the catalog to produce a binary format (.mo) that works
 with gettext to efficiently look up the translated string.

 At runtime, you figure out what locale the user wants (in BridgeDB see
 HTTPServer.py setLocaleFromRequestHeader) and tell gettext which language
 you want to translate for (lang.install()). Then, whenver the _() wrapper
 is encountered, gettext goes off and searches the corresponding .mo file
 (you did update it all the messages, and reinstall BridgeDB to put all the
 .mo files in the right paths, right?) to find the matching string and
 returns that instead of the original text.

 Hopefully this makes it a bit clearer what is going on. If you're having
 troubles with English missing some of the time, dump the output of the
 expected locale to a debug log and make sure it is set to None or "en" so
 that the default (untranslated) locale will be returned. It could be that
 BridgeDB isn't setting the locale properly in some context (global state +
 twisted async madness? who knows..). If English is always missing, git
 bisect is your friend :)

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9959#comment:1>
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