Translating R Messages, R <= 2.15.3

R supports the translation of its messages, including error and warning messages and menu labels. This document is intended for translation teams but starts with a user's view of the process extracted from the R Installation and Administration Manual.

These instructions apply to R up to 2.15.3: the version for R-devel (to be 3.0.0 in April 2013) are here.

The MacOS X GUI also has translatable messages: see the separate section at the end of this document.

Message Domains

Messages are divided into domains, and translations may be available for some or all messages in a domain. R makes use of the following domains.

Domain R for C-level error and warning messages from the R interpreter.
Domain R-pkg for the R stop and warning messages in each package, including R-base for the base package.
Domain pkg for the C-level messages in each package.
Domain RGui for the menus etc of the R for Windows GUI front-end.

Dividing up the messages in this way allows R to be extensible: as packages are loaded, their message translation catalogues can be loaded too.

Translations are looked for by domain according to the currently specified language, as specifically as possible, so for example an Austrian (de_AT) translation catalogue will be used in preference to a generic German one (de) for an Austrian user. However, if a specific translation catalogue exists but does not contain a translation, the less specific catalogues are consulted. For example, R has catalogues for en_GB that translate the Americanisms (e.g. gray) in the standard messages into English.

Translations in the right language but the wrong charset can generally be made use of by on-the-fly re-encoding. The LANGUAGE variable can be a colon-separated list, for example se:de, giving a set of languages in decreasing order of preference.

If no suitable translation catalogue is found or a particular message is not translated in the selected catalogue, English is used. The translated catalogues are stored as binary files with extension .mo. Those for domains R and RGui are under R_HOME/share/locale and the package-specific catalogues under the po directory of the installed package (and so need to be under inst/po in the sources). These directories contain one directory for each translation identified by language, e.g. se or de_AT. Each language directory has a subdirectory LC_MESSAGES, and within that files for each domain. So an R installation will contain at least files

    share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/R.mo
    share/locale/en@quot/LC_MESSAGES/R.mo
    library/splines/po/en/LC_MESSAGES/R-splines.mo
    library/splines/po/en/LC_MESSAGES/splines.mo

(The `language' en@quot is English with Unicode bidirectional quotation marks for use in a UTF-8 locale.)

Translation prerequisites

You need GNU gettext installed: specifically gettext-tools if your system differentiates it from gettext-runtime. (Linux users will not need the development RPM.) The gettext manual is the best reference source. Command-line 32-bit Windows versions of the tools are available from www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/goodies. Emacs users can use PO mode to help with managing translations: this is described in the gettext manual.

There are some Linux-alike tools developed for the KDE project, notably KBabel.

Windows users can find pre-compiled versions of gettext at any mirror of the GNU archive. The poEdit editor is recommended by the Fedora translators, and comes with the gettext tools needed.

Preparing and installing a translation

Suppose you wanted to prepare a Slovenian translation for the splines package. The ISO 639 code for Slovenian is sl. Go to the src/library/splines/po directory and run (preferably in a Slovenian locale)

    msginit -i R-splines.pot -o R-sl.po
    msginit -i splines.pot -o sl.po

If this does not work for you, just copy the files to the names given and fill in the header.

Now check over the header entries and fill in the msgstr entries in these files. The originals will look like

  # Slovenian translations for R package
  # Slovenski prevodi paketa R.
  # Copyright (C) 2005 THE R'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
  # This file is distributed under the same license as the R package.
  # Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>, 2005.
  #
  msgid ""
  msgstr ""
  "Project-Id-Version: R 2.1.0\n"
  "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: bugs@r-project.org\n"
  "POT-Creation-Date: 2005-01-25 17:26+0000\n"
  "PO-Revision-Date: 2005-02-04 08:37+0000\n"
  "Last-Translator: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>\n"
  "Language-Team: Slovenian\n"
  "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
  "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2\n"
  "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
  "Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; plural=(n%100==1 ? 0 : n%100==2 ? 1 : n%100==3 || n"
  "%100==4 ? 2 : 3);\n"

  #: splines.c:154
  msgid "'ord' must be a positive integer"
  msgstr ""

If you leave a translation as "" the untranslated message (msgid) will be used.

Some messages have plural forms, e.g.

  msgid        "Warning message:\n"
  msgid_plural "Warning messages:\n"
  msgstr[0]    ""
  msgstr[1]    ""

The Plural-Forms: line tells you what these mean: in languages with just singular and one plural, the first is singular and the second is plural. For languages without plurals, just give one line starting msgstr[0]. Slovenian would need four lines.

Then compile and install the translated catalogues by

    mkdir ../inst/po/sl/LC_MESSAGES
    msgfmt -c --statistics -o ../inst/po/sl/LC_MESSAGES/R-splines.mo R-sl.po
    msgfmt -c --statistics -o ../inst/po/sl/LC_MESSAGES/splines.mo sl.po

and when you next install the package the translations will be ready for use. Using -c enables a number of consistency checks that have proven useful. Using --statistics gives some details of the coverage of the translations.

The process for the domains R and RGui is almost identical: their template files R.pot and RGui.pot are in the po subdirectory of the R sources and they are installed to share/locale/sl/LC_MESSAGES.

The translations to language ll should be called ll.po and RGui-ll.po. If you translate first the start-up messages in R.pot (in src/main/version.c, currently at lines 36, 39 and 42) it will be easy for people to check that a translation is working. You can compile (and check) the translations by

    msgfmt -c --statistics -o ll.gmo ll.po
    msgfmt -c --statistics -o RGui-ll.gmo RGui-ll.po

and install them manually by

    mkdir ../share/locale/ll/LC_MESSAGES
    cp ll.gmo ../share/locale/ll/LC_MESSAGES/R.mo
    cp RGui-ll.gmo ../share/locale/ll/LC_MESSAGES/RGui.mo

(replacing ll by your real language code, of course). Automated installation is possible by adding your language to the po/LINGUAS file and listing some files in po/Makefile.{in.in,win} (following the comments they contain).

Translators can choose any suitable encoding, but for RGui-ll.po it is best to use the native encoding for the language on Windows. Otherwise, if possible choose an encoding that the development team will be able to run your language in as a Linux locale: UTF-8 is their first choice.

Translators may find it useful to consult the ISI glossary of statistical terms.

Compendia

Sometimes you will encounter a translation you know you have done for a different domain (which sometimes happens as code is migrated). Then the compendium facility of msgmerge can be very useful. First delete any fuzzy translation which has been generated, then use e.g.

    msgmerge --update ll.po stats.pot -C other.po

where the final .po file is used to pick up existing translations (even those not in use there). More than one compendium file can be supplied.

C-like format strings

Some messages contain C-like format strings such as "%s" for use either by gettextf in R or by the C-level error functions.

It is important that these match exactly in the msgid and msgstr lines: mismatches can cause R to crash or nonsense to be output.

As from R 2.15.1 patched, the function checkPoFiles in package tools implements a check: please make use of it before finalizing your translations.

Submitting a translation

To submit a translation for inclusion in the R sources please make a tar with all the source files you added, perhaps by (untested)

    tar zcvf sl-po.tar.gz po/*sl.po src/library/*/po/*sl.po

and send it to the R core team.

Translations of messages in recommended packages should be sent to their maintainers.

The MacOS X GUI

The MacOS X Cocoa GUI currently uses Apple's Cocoa localization framework which is different from the gettext approach used by R, but still very similar from translator's point of view. In the following we will assume that the translation is done on a machine running Mac OS X with Apple Developer Tools installed and the Mac-GUI project sources present.

Practically any resource, file or text used in the Mac-GUI can be localized. The first elements to start with are text messages, followed by GUI elements and finally images and supplemental documentation. All those items are located in the "Resources" group of the Mac-GUI project.

Adding support for a new language

Adding a new translation of a resource is done as follows:

Open the Mac-GUI project in Xcode and locate the resource to translate in the "Resources" group.
Select the resource and click on "Get Info" (or press <Cmd><I>).
Click on "Add Localization.."
Enter the ISO 639 code for the language.
Note: although the drop-down list offers full language names such as "German", please use ISO 639 codes (such as de) instead, because the use of full names is deprecated.
There will be a new node in the resources tree listing the language you just created. Edit the resource to reflect the new language - see below for details.

There are three basic sets of resources that need to be translated:

Text messages (such as "Cannot open file %@ for writing.")
GUI elements (such as buttons, text fields, labels etc.)
Images (such as toolbar icons) and supplemental files (such as acknowledgements)

Text messages are located in the Localizable.strings resource which is a text file of the form "english"="translation";, for example (from the German translation):

"Cancel"="Abbrechen"; "Choose File"="Wählen Sie eineDatei";

The corresponding file is created when a new localization is added. Please use UTF-8 encoding when editing those files externally (in Xcode select Format -> File Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8)).

GUI elements are located inside NIB files (NeXT Interface Builder files). First step to add a localized version of a NIB file is to follow the "Adding a new translation" step above which will produce a copy of the English original that will have to be translated. One way to translate such file would be to edit it directly in the Interface Builder, but this is rather tedious and would require some knowledge of Cocoa, therefore we use a more generic approach. It is possible to generate the same "strings" files as used for text messages and use those to translate GUI elements. To generate such files, run

update.localization

in the Mac-GUI directory. This script will create a new directory Translated.strings which contains strings files for each NIB file and language, for example: MainMenu.de.strings. This file has the same format as the text messages strings file and should be translated the same way. Before editing the file it is crucial to set the file encoding to UTF-8! Once all necessary strings files are translated, they can be used to translate the NIB file by running the script as follows:

update.localization -t

Don't forget the -t switch, otherwise your files in Translated.strings will be overwritten! The existing NIB files are updated by this script to reflect any changes in the strings files. Optionally the NIB files can be manually tweaked if necessary, such as if the labels of some GUI elements are longer than the element itself. Such minor changes will be preserved by the update.localization script later.

Other resources are localized by simply editing the copy that was made when using "Add Localization...". There are no automated ways of modifying images or other resource files. Please note that any resources that are no different from the English version don't need to be copied using "Add Localization...". The GUI will automatically use the English version if there is no localized version of the resource.

Submitting a Mac-GUI translation

There are basically two options how to perform and submit Mac-GUI translations:

Providing localized resources
This is the preferred method, but requires you to use Xcode and understand the instructions above. When you localize resources, please send us an archive containing both the English original and the translated resources. This will allow us to incorporate your translation even if the Mac-GUI project changed in the meantime. Let's assume you have new resources for the language XX. To create an archive for submission, type the following in the Terminal while in the Mac-GUI directory:
```
tar fvcz res-XX.tar.gz English.lproj XX.lproj
```
Send the resulting archive res-XX.tar.gz to the Mac-GUI authors.
Using strings files only
If you don't have a Mac or don't know how to follow the instructions above, but you are sure you can translate the GUI into another language, ask the Mac-GUI authors to send you the strings text files for translation. You can edit those files using any editor that supports UTF-8 and return the translated files to us. Since you have no direct way of seeing the results of the translation, this method is much less preferrable than using localized resources directly.

Brian Ripley
2012-07-14