12.2. Create a translation package for UCS

UCS provides builtin English and German localization and a French translation package. Univention provides a set of tools that facilitates the creation of translation packages. Translation packages can provide translations for all translatable strings of UCS for a specific language. The Univention Management Console, more specifically its packages, contains the largest share of translatable strings. This section describes all necessary steps to create a translation package for UCS.

12.2.1. Install needed tools

The package univention-l10n-dev contains all tools required to set up and update a translation package. It requires some additional Debian tools to build the package. Run the following command on UCS to install all needed packages.

$ sudo univention-install univention-l10n-dev dpkg-dev git

12.2.2. Obtain a current checkout of the UCS Git repository

The Git repository is later processed to get initial files for a new translation (often referred to as PO file or Portable Objects).

$ mkdir ~/translation
$ cd ~/translation
$ git clone \
  --single-branch \
  --depth 1 \
  --shallow-submodules \
  https://github.com/univention/univention-corporate-server

12.2.3. Create translation package

To create a translation package, for example for French, in the current working directory, the following command must be executed:

$ cd ~/translation
$ univention-ucs-translation-build-package \
  --source ~/translation/univention-corporate-server \
  --languagecode fr \
  --locale fr_FR.UTF-8:UTF-8 \
  --language-name French

This creates a new directory ~/translation/univention-l10n-fr/ which contains a Debian source package of the same name. It includes all source and target files for the translation.

12.2.4. Edit translation files

The translation source files (.po files) are located below the directory ~/translation/univention-l10n-fr/fr. Each file should be edited to create the translation. Refer to Editing translation files for detailed information.

12.2.5. Update the translation package

First update the Git repository:

$ cd ~/translation/univention-corporate-server
$ git pull --rebase

If changes affecting translations are made in the Git repository, existing translation packages need to be updated to reflect those changes. Given a path to an updated Git checkout, univention-ucs-translation-merge can update a previously created translation source package.

The following example updates the translation package univention-l10n-fr:

$ univention-ucs-translation-merge \
  ~/translation/univention-corporate-server \
  ~/translation/univention-l10n-fr

12.2.6. Build the translation package

Before using the new translation, the Debian package has to be built and installed. This can be done with the following commands:

$ cd ~/translation/univention-l10n-fr
$ sudo apt-get build-dep .
$ dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b -rfakeroot
$ sudo dpkg -i ../univention-l10n-fr_*.deb

After logging out of the Univention Management Console the new language should now be selectable in the Univention Management Console login window. Untranslated strings are still shown in their original language, that is, in English.