MusicBrainz Server/Internationalization

The MusicBrainz Server code is using gettext to provide with automatic internationalisation of messages and texts used in the Perl code and templates.

A .pot file is provided with all the strings used in the server. They are in English.

Getting started

If you want to help translate, go to the Transifex page and create an account. If there is already a team for your language, you can request to join it, if not, you can ask for the creation of a new team.

Viewing the translations

The translations are available at http://i18n.mbsandbox.org/ - you can change the language in the menu at the top right. Edits can be made here, but they won't show up in the main database. The translations update every hour. If you have made changes on Transifex which are still not showing up several hours later, please contact Nikki or Ian.

Some of the more complete translations (generally those over 50% translated) are also available on the beta server at https://beta.musicbrainz.org/. The translations do not update automatically, but the beta server uses the same database as the main server. If you want to use the beta server all of the time for your editing, click the "Use beta site" link in the footer of https://musicbrainz.org/.

Language-specific pages

This wiki is the perfect place to discuss specific languages translations issues such as glossary, or right-to-left required patches etc.

• French

• Italian

• Polish

• Spanish

• Esperanto

• Finnish

Importing ISO lists

There are conveniently LGPL 2.1 pretranslated lists for a bunch of ISO standard lists at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=iso-codes/iso-codes.git;a=tree (specifically, we use 3166, 639, and 15924).

To bring these translations in as a base for countries, languages, and scripts, follow this procedure:

• Download a .po for translation from Transifex. We'll assume it's called mbs.po for the sake of commands below.
• Download the proper language .po from the link above for each of the three lists. We'll assume they're called 3166.po, 639.po, and 15924.po.
• Check the translations – many are wrong in some translations, and if so you should not import.
• msgmerge -N 3166.po mbs.po -o mbs1.po
• msgmerge -N 639.po mbs1.po -o mbs2.po
• msgmerge -N 15924.po mbs2.po -o mbs-final.po
• msgfmt -c mbs-final.po
• Correct any errors msgfmt complains about, then use Transifex's 'Upload File' and upload mbs-final.po.

Alternatively the ISO standard lists can be uploaded directly to Transifex, which will subsequently merge the common strings itself as appropriate.

Congratulations, you should then have all the countries/languages/scripts translated!