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Merging translations from Crowdin

Crowdin automatically syncs the gitlab.pot file with the Crowdin service, presenting newly added externalized strings to the community of translators.

The GitLab Crowdin Bot also creates merge requests to take newly approved translation submissions and merge them into the locale/<language>/gitlab.po files. Check the merge requests created by gitlab-crowdin-bot to see new and merged merge requests.

Validation

By default Crowdin commits translations with [skip ci] in the commit message. This avoids an excessive number of pipelines from running. Before merging translations, make sure to trigger a pipeline to validate translations. Static analysis validates things Crowdin doesn't do. Create a new pipeline at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/pipelines/new (requires the Developer role) for the master-i18n branch.

The pipeline job validates translations with the PoLinter class. If the linter finds any errors, they appear in the job log. For an example of a failed pipeline, see these error messages.

If validation errors occur, you must manually disapprove the offending string in Crowdin and leave a comment about how to fix the errors:

  1. Sign in to Crowdin with the gitlab-crowdin-bot account.
  2. Find the offending string.
  3. Select Current translation is wrong to disapprove the translation for the specific target language.
  4. Include the error message from the job log as a comment.

The invalid translation is then excluded, and the merge request is updated. Automating this process is proposed in issue 23256.

If the translation fails validation due to angle brackets (< or >), it should be disapproved in Crowdin. Our strings must use variables for HTML instead.

It might be useful to pause the integration on the Crowdin side for a moment so translations don't keep coming. You can do this by selecting Pause sync on the Crowdin integration settings page.

Merging translations

After all translations are determined to be appropriate and the pipelines pass, you can merge the translations into the default branch. When merging translations, be sure to select the Remove source branch checkbox. This causes Crowdin to recreate the master-i18n branch from the default branch after merging the new translation.

We are discussing automating this entire process.

Recreate the merge request

Crowdin creates a new merge request as soon as the old one is closed or merged. But it does not recreate the master-i18n branch every time. To force Crowdin to recreate the branch, close any open merge requests and delete the master-18n branch.

This might be needed when the merge request contains failures that have been fixed on the default branch.

Recreate the GitLab integration in Crowdin

NOTE: These instructions work only for GitLab Team Members.

If for some reason the GitLab integration in Crowdin doesn't exist, you can recreate it with the following steps:

  1. Sign in to GitLab as gitlab-crowdin-bot. (If you're a GitLab Team Member, find credentials in the GitLab shared 1Password account.)
  2. Sign in to Crowdin with the GitLab integration.
  3. Go to Settings > Integrations > GitLab > Set Up Integration.
  4. Select the gitlab-org/gitlab repository.
  5. In Select Branches for Translation, select master.
  6. Ensure the Service Branch Name is master-i18n.

Manually update the translation levels

There's no automated way to pull the translation levels from Crowdin, to display this information in the language selection dropdown list. Therefore, the translation levels are hard-coded in the TRANSLATION_LEVELS constant in i18n.rb, and must be regularly updated.

To update the translation levels:

  1. Get the translation levels (percentage of approved words) from Crowdin.

  2. Update the hard-coded translation levels in i18n.rb.