Skip to content
← Back to projects

Translate

Useful localization tools with Python API for building localization & translation systems

#Translate Toolkit

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/translate-toolkit.svg :alt: Released version :target: https://pypi.org/project/translate-toolkit/

.. image:: https://readthedocs.org/projects/translate-toolkit/badge/ :target: https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/translate-toolkit.svg :alt: Supported Python versions :target: https://pypi.org/project/translate-toolkit/

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/l/translate-toolkit.svg :target: https://pypi.org/project/translate-toolkit/ :alt: License

The Translate Toolkit is an essential toolkit for localization engineers. It contains tools and documentation to help localizers convert, count, manipulate, review and debug localization files with less repetitive work.

The software includes programs to convert localization formats to the common PO and XLIFF formats. There are also programs to check and manage PO and XLIFF files. The Toolkit is part of the Translate project, hosted at https://github.com/translate/translate.

At its core the software contains Python classes for handling localization storage formats such as DTD, properties, OpenOffice.org GSI/SDF, CSV, MO, Qt .ts, TMX, TBX, WordFast txt, Gettext .mo, Windows RC, PO and XLIFF. It also provides scripts to convert between these formats.

#Features

  • Format converters for localization, translation and software formats, so translators can work in standard translation formats.
  • Quality assurance tools for pattern searches, language-aware checks, terminology extraction and other review tasks.
  • Python APIs that can be expanded with new formats, project types, localization tests and language modules.

#Important Links

  • Latest release downloads <https://github.com/translate/translate/releases>_
  • Documentation <https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/>_, also use --help with any of the commands.
  • The Translate Toolkit is released under the GPL <https://github.com/translate/translate/blob/master/COPYING>_ with contributions from many people <https://github.com/translate/translate/blob/master/CREDITS>_.
  • Reporting issues <https://github.com/translate/translate/issues>_
  • Reporting security vulnerabilities <https://github.com/translate/translate/security/advisories/new>_
  • Installation <https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/installation.html>_
  • Release notes <https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/releases/index.html>_
  • Source code <https://github.com/translate/translate>_

#Project goals

The vision of the Translate Project is to be a meta project for localizers built on the premise that your language deserves to be a project on its own right not a poor cousin of the main project.

Most projects are inattentive to the needs and difficulties experienced by localizers. To that end the aim is to work towards creating tools and documentation that allows localizers to focus on what they do best: translating software.

#Requirements

The recommended installation is using uv or pip in a virtual environment::

uv pip install translate-toolkit

or::

pip install translate-toolkit

You can also download a stable released version from https://github.com/translate/translate/releases and install it manually.

The Toolkit requires Python 3.11 or newer. The required runtime dependencies are lxml>=6.1.0,<7.0 and unicode-segmentation-rs>=0.2.0,<0.3.

There are several optional dependencies for format-specific features and speed ups. They can be requested as extras during installation::

# Install all optional dependencies
pip install translate-toolkit[all]

# Install selected optional dependencies
pip install translate-toolkit[markdown,ini,ical,subtitles,yaml,spellcheck]

Available extras include chardet, fluent, ical, ini, levenshtein, markdown, php, rc, spellcheck, subtitles, toml and yaml. Please check pyproject.toml for the current dependency versions.

#Program overview

Use --help to find the syntax and options for all programs.

.. note::

This is a selection of the most commonly used tools. For the complete list of converters and tools, see the command documentation <https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/commands/index.html>_.

  • Converters::

      oo2po    - convert between OpenOffice.org GSI files and PO
      oo2xliff - convert between OpenOffice.org GSI files and XLIFF
      moz2po   - convert between Mozilla files and PO
      csv2po   - convert PO format to CSV for editing in a spreadsheet program
      php2po   - PHP localisable string arrays converter.
      ts2po    - convert Qt Linguist (.ts) files to PO
      txt2po   - convert simple text files to PO
      html2po  - convert HTML to PO (beta)
      md2po    - convert Markdown to PO
      xliff2po - XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) converter
      prop2po  - convert Java .properties files to PO
      po2wordfast - Wordfast Translation Memory converter
      po2tmx   - TMX (Translation Memory Exchange) converter
      pot2po   - PO file initialiser
      csv2tbx  - Create TBX (TermBase eXchange) files from Comma Separated
                 Value (CSV) files
      ini2po   - convert .ini files to PO
      ical2po  - Convert iCalendar files (*.ics) to PO
      sub2po   - Convert many subtitle files to PO
      rc2po    - convert Windows Resource .rc files to PO
      resx2po  - convert .Net Resource (.resx) files to PO
    
  • Tools (Quality Assurance)::

      pofilter - run any of the 40+ checks on your PO files
      pomerge  - merge corrected translations from pofilter back into
                 your existing PO files.
      poconflicts - identify conflicting use of terms
      porestructure - restructures po files according to poconflict directives
      pogrep   - find words in PO files
    
  • Tools (Other)::

      pocompile - create a Gettext MO files from PO or XLIFF files
      pocount   - count translatable file formats (PO, XLIFF)
      podebug   - Create comment in your PO files' msgstr which can
                  then be used to quickly track down mistranslations
                  as the comments appear in the application.
      posegment - Break a PO or XLIFF files into sentence segments,
                  useful for creating a segmented translation memory.
      poswap    - uses a translation of another language that you
                  would rather use than English as source language
      poterminology - analyse PO or POT files to build a list of
                      frequently occurring words and phrases
    

New version available.