Translatomatic

Translates text files from one language to another, or from one format to another. The following file formats are currently supported:

The following translation providers can be used with Translatomatic:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Yandex
• MyMemory
• Frengly

Translated strings are saved in a database and reused.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'translatomatic'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install translatomatic

This gem provides an executable called translatomatic. The translatomatic command has a number of functions, not all of which are documented here. For help on available commands and options, execute:

$ translatomatic help

And for help on a command, execute:

$ translatomatic translate help
$ translatomatic translate help file

Check for available translation providers and options with the providers command:

$ translatomatic providers

Options can be specified on the command line, in environment variables, or in translatomatic's configuration files. The configuration files can be modified using translatomatic's internal config command. To list all available configuration settings, use:

$ translatomatic config list
$ translatomatic config describe

Options can be set at the user level or the project level. See also the Configuration section below for more information.

When translating files, translatomatic translates text one sentence or phrase at a time. If a file is re-translated, only sentences that have changed since the last translation are sent to the translation provider, and the rest are sourced from the local database.

To translate a Java properties file to German and French using the Google provider:

$ translatomatic translate file --provider Google strings.properties de,fr

This would create (or overwrite) strings_de.properties and strings_fr.properties with translated properties.

To read and display the store.description and store.name properties from local resource files in English, German, and French:

$ translatomatic display --locales=en,de,fr \
    resources/strings.properties store.description store.name

To extract strings from source files, use the strings command, e.g.

$ translatomatic strings file.rb

Translatomatic can be used to convert files from one format to another. For example, to convert a Java properties file to an XCode strings file:

$ translatomatic convert strings.properties Localization.strings

A context can be associated with strings using a tm.context: comment. This helps translatomatic find the correct translation for words that can have multiple meanings, e.g. the word 'right' in English can have multiple meanings depending on context.

# tm.context: go right
property_name = right

This associates the context go right with the property property_name. See the spec/fixtures/translation_context directory in this project for examples of formatting translation contexts for different file formats.

Configuration settings can be read and written using the config get and config set commands. Translatomatic uses a user configuration file at $HOME/.translatomatic/config.yml, and optionally a per project configuration file $PROJECT_DIR/.translatomatic/config.yml.

The --user and --project options can be used to tell the command to read or write to the user or project configuration.

Configuration settings are read from environment variables, the user configuration file, the project configuration file (if present), and from the command line. The last value found takes precedence over values read earlier.

When writing to the configuration with the config set command, the new value is written to the project configuration file when executed within a project containing a translatomatic configuration file, or the user configuration file if there is no project configuration file.

To set google_api_key within the user configuration file, use:

$ translatomatic config set google_api_key value --user

To set one or more translation services to use:

$ translatomatic config set provider Microsoft,Yandex

To set a default list of target locales:

$ translatomatic config set target_locales en,de,es,fr,it

With target_locales set, files can be translated without specifying target locales in the translate file command.

$ translatomatic translate file resources/strings.properties

To display the current configuration, execute:

$ translatomatic config list

By default, translatomatic uses an sqlite3 database in $HOME/.translatomatic/translatomatic.sqlite3 to store translated strings. The database configuration can be changed by creating a database.yml file under $HOME/.translatomatic/database.yml for the production environment, e.g.

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  host: db.example.com
  database: translatomatic
  pool: 5
  encoding: utf8
  collation: utf8_bin
  username: username
  password: password

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/smugglys/translatomatic. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting with the Translatomatic project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.