Localization of The Requests Documentation

[hwhsu1231]

Announcement

Hello Requests Community,

I am the author of the @localizethedocs organization. And I’m glad to announce that the 🎉 requests-docs-l10n 🎉 project is published now:

• 🚀 Preview: requests-docs-l10n
• 🌐 Crowdin: requests-docs-l10n
• 🐙 GitHub: requests-docs-l10n

The goal of this project is to translate The Requests Documentation into multiple languages. Translations are contributed via the Crowdin platform, automatically synchronized with the GitHub repository, and can be previewed on GitHub Pages.

How to Contribute Translations?

To contribute the translations to the project, just follow the following steps:

1. Create an account on Crowdin Enterprise if you don't have one.
2. Log in and go the requests-docs-l10n project.
3. Choose the language you would like to contribute.

If translators want to translate a language that is not yet supported, they just need to open a new issue to request the new language. Once the requested language is added, they can begin translating.

How to Keep Content Up-to-date?

An FAQ that is sure to come up in the Requests community is: How to keep translations up-to-date?

First and foremost, in my opinion, the focus should be on how to keep the "Translatable Content (msgid)" up-to-date, rather than the "Translations (msgstr)". I will focus on the most critical part of the whole infrastructure here.

In short, the ci-sphinx-update-pot.yml workflow will be executed weekly to check the upstream project for any required updates to the document content, which in turn triggers the update of the .pot files. If an update is needed, a Pull Request (PR) is automatically created to merge into the l10n branch. For example:

• 🌐 pot(stable): update .pot from Sphinx localizethedocs/requests-docs-l10n#2
• 🌐 pot(latest): update .pot from Sphinx localizethedocs/requests-docs-l10n#3

Once those PRs are merged, the ci-gettext-update-po.yml workflow will be triggered to merge the updated content from the .pot files into the .po files for each language. This is essentially how it keeps the "Translatable Content" up-to-date.

Therefore, the core responsibility of the code maintainers, besides ensuring the stable operation of the scripts and workflows, is to regularly check whether there are any pending PRs that need to be merged.

How to Reuse Translations?

If the upstream project or anyone wants to reuse the translated .po files prepared by the requests-docs-l10n project, they can clone the .po files from the po/${VERSION} branch by using the following command:

git clone --depth=1 --branch=po/${VERSION} https://github.com/localizethedocs/requests-docs-l10n.git docs/locale

Those po/${VERSION} branches are created to facilitate reusage by the upstream project. For instance, the zh_TW documentation for the latest version can be generated using the commands below:

BRANCH=main
VERSION=latest
LANGUAGE=zh_TW
BUILDER=html

# Prepare the repository and environment
git clone --branch=${BRANCH} https://github.com/psf/requests.git requests-docs
cd requests-docs
conda create --prefix ./.conda --yes
conda activate ./.conda
conda install python=3.13 -c conda-forge -c nodefaults --yes
export PYTHONNOUSERSITE=1
pip install . -r docs/requirements.txt

# Clone the .po files to the 'locale' directory
git clone --branch=po/${VERSION} --depth=1 https://github.com/localizethedocs/requests-docs-l10n.git docs/locale

# Build the documentation
sphinx-build \
    -b ${BUILDER} \
    -D language=${LANGUAGE} \
    -D locale_dirs=locale \
    -D gettext_compact=0 \
    -D gettext_additional_targets=index,literal-block,raw \
    docs \
    docs/_build/${LANGUAGE}

# Preview the documentation
firefox docs/_build/${LANGUAGE}/index.html

Related Discussions

There were issues and PRs related to documentation translations:

• Moving documentation translation to translating platform #3033
• Documentation Translation Guide #624
• DOC,BUG: 404: Spanish translation links require .html #5902
• Cannot jump to Japanese documentation #5518
• Spanish translation is missing from documentation sidebar #2750
• [DOC] Misleading Statement in Chinese Translation of Documentation #5679
• did it update doc? #3221
• Missing link to Italian translation of documentation #2744
• Parts of the documentation still link to python-requests.org #6142
• Fixing a tiny typo, noticed while working on the Polish translation #1330
• Add link to IT translation #2746
• Add link to ES translation. #2751
• Cleanup the docs sidebar #6144

And the @requests community once actively maintained documentation translations through the "source translation" method:

• Chinese: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-cn
• Japanese: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-jp
• German: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-de
• French: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-fr
• Polish: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-pl
• Portuguese: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-pt
• Dutch: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-nl
• Bulgarian: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-bg
• Arabic: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-ar
• Danish: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-da
• Italian: https://github.com/requests/requests-docs-it

However, these efforts were eventually abandoned and became unmaintainable for various reasons. Notably, issue #3033 suggested migrating documentation translations to a TMS platform. Therefore, I believe that the requests-docs-l10n project should be able to serve this purpose.