Pootle is an online translation management tool with a translation interface. It is written in the

Python programming language Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically type-checked and garbage-collected. It supports multiple prog ...

using the Django framework and is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

originally developed and released by Translate.org.za in 2004. It was further developed as part of the WordForge project and the African Network for Localisation and is now maintained by Translate.org.za. Pootle is a software platform for localization of applications' graphical user interfaces, as opposed to document translation. Pootle makes use of the Translate Toolkit for manipulating translation files and offline features used to manage the translation of

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

and

Gajim Gajim is an instant messaging client for the XMPP protocol which uses the GTK toolkit. The name Gajim is a recursive acronym for ''Gajim's a jabber instant messenger''. Gajim runs on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. Released under the ...

in Pootle. Pootle has built-in

terminology extraction Terminology extraction (also known as term extraction, glossary extraction, term recognition, or terminology mining) is a subtask of information extraction. The goal of terminology extraction is to automatically extract relevant terms from a gi ...

translation memory A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The trans ...

, glossary management and matching, goal creation, and management of users. In the translation process, it can display statistics for the body of translations hosted by the server and allow users to make translation suggestions and corrections for later review. It acts as a translation-specific bug reporting system, allowing online translation with various translators, operating as a management system where translators translate using an offline tool and use Pootle to manage the workflow of the translation. The development of Pootle has stalled since 2007 because the latest version of Pootle (2.9) still supports only Python 2, despite Python 3 coming out in 2008. Nobody has migrated Pootle to Python 3.

History

Pootle was first developed by David Fraser while working for Translate.org.za in a project funded by th
CATIA
programme. Its first official release was made in December 2004, although it had been used in various internal Translate@thons by Translate.org.za. The name Pootle is an acronym for ''PO-based Online Translation / Localization Engine'', but it is also a character in the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

children's program '' The Flumps''. Translate.org.za released various versions and in 2006 Pootle was further developed as part of the WordForge project, a project funded by the

Open Society Institute Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is an American grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the world, with the s ...

and the

International Development Research Centre The International Development Research Centre (IDRC; , ''CRDI'') is a Canadian federal Crown corporation. As part of Canada's foreign affairs and development efforts, IDRC champions and funds research and innovation within and alongside developi ...

. This added

XLIFF XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) is an XML-based bitext format created to standardize the way localizable data are passed between and among tools during a localization process and a common format for CAT tool exchange. The XLIFF ...

file management and infrastructure for translation workflow. Many of these features were added in the 1.0 release. Pootle is used by

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

, One Laptop Per Child's learning environment

Sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose Glucose is a sugar with the Chemical formula#Molecular formula, molecul ...

and other projects.Pootle live server
list of active Pootle servers Pootle is the basis of the Verbatim project which is building localisation infrastructure for

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

projects.

Design philosophy

Pootle was designed to be a web translation tool using the Translate Toolkit. It serves as a translation management system, treating translation files as documents and managing them as such. The aim of Pootle is never to replace existing processes but rather to enhance them. Thus it interacts with upstream version control systems allowing it to commit changes directly to the main project rather than maintaining a parallel system outside of the project. It is free software and projects are encouraged to host their own Pootle server to allow their community to localise.

Supported source document formats

The Translate Toolkit provides conversion from its supported source document formats which include: Java and Mozilla .properties files, OpenOffice.org SDF files, PHP arrays, HTML, Text,

and

Gettext In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. One of the main benefits of gettext is that it separates programmi ...

PO. Pootle itself works directly on Gettext PO and XLIFF files, as well as Qt .ts, TBX and TMX (since version 2.0.3). Since Pootle 2.1.0 there is also native support for several other formats, such as Java .properties files, PHP array files, strings and several subtitle formats.

Features

Terminology extraction Terminology extraction (also known as term extraction, glossary extraction, term recognition, or terminology mining) is a subtask of information extraction. The goal of terminology extraction is to automatically extract relevant terms from a gi ...

based on term frequency * Translation memory - created by an offline tool *

Machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

through popular online services * Alternative source language - view translations from a third language while translating * Glossary - choose between live global glossary or a glossary per project * Goals - set goals and add users to goals * Statistics - word count and string statistics * Suggestions - allow suggestions to be made allowing outside participation and bug reporting * Version control - update from or commit directly to upstream version control systems * User management - assign various rights to users * Translation interface - perform online translation and review * Checks - performs over 40 checks on translation quality

References

External links