InternationalizationPlan

This page concerns translating the web interface, please see TranslatingMercurial for how to translate the rest of Mercurial.

Things that need to be done

• make output strings go through gettext

• detect appropriate locale for output

• store changelog and other relevant pieces in UTF8

• make hgweb translatable

• create translations (see TranslatingMercurial)

How to proceed

There are some unknowns here and some difficult pieces. They're getting in the way of forward progress. Thus, we should do the simple things that we know need doing incrementally and defer the hard parts.

Things we know how to do:

• wrap all messages for gettext

• find locales on UNIX

• make gettext calls once we know the locale

• convert changelog data from a known locale to UTF8 for storage (see ChangelogEncodingPlan)

• handle locale braindamage on Windows (see CharacterEncodingOnWindows)

Things that are a bit harder:

• make hgweb translatable
• actually doing a translation

Things we're not sure about:

• dealing with filesystem locales, especially on Windows

Things that are not our problem:

• any sort of translation of repository data aside from changelogs

Some simplifying assumptions

Let's assume for now that:

• all filenames are already UTF8
• all existing changelog messages are UTF8 as well

Thoughts on making hgweb templates translatable

This has a few parts:

• marking template strings as translatable
• scanning the templates to find the translatable strings
• doing translations in the template engine

The first step is to come up with a syntax for marking strings as translatable. Thus, we need a new markup format. Something like this ought to suffice:

<b>{{this is a translatable string}}</b>

So an initial approach is to teach hgweb about this syntax (and initially pass strings out unchanged), then go mark some strings as translatable so that the scanning piece can be done.