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Translations

TablePro Linux uses GNU gettext for localisation. Source strings go through the helpers in crates/app/src/i18n.rs; at runtime bindtextdomain("tablepro", …) points gettext at config::LOCALEDIR, which meson sets at build time.

Which function to call

Case Call
A plain string gettext("Cancel")
A string with values in it gettext_f("{table} in {schema}", &[("table", name), ("schema", schema)])
A count ngettext_f("{n} row", "{n} rows", n, &[("n", &n.to_string())])
A word whose sense depends on where it appears pgettext("filter operator", "all")
A word in context, with values in it pgettext_f
A count whose word depends on where it appears npgettext

Placeholders are named, never positional. A translator can reorder {table} and {schema} freely, and a value is substituted once, so a value containing braces is never expanded again. An unknown placeholder stays in the string rather than disappearing, which makes a typo visible.

Do not translate symbols, SQL keywords, or the word TablePro.

Where translators work

Translations come in as pull requests against po/<locale>.po, one language per pull request, reviewed like code. There is no hosted translation service.

Locale Language Status
vi Vietnamese Ships
fr, ko, tr, zh_CN, zh_TW French, Korean, Turkish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese Wanted: the macOS app ships these

Start from the template CI builds, so you do not need gettext 1.0:

  • the tablepro-pot artifact of the latest Build Linux run on main, which a nightly run keeps fresh (downloading it needs a GitHub sign-in);
  • tablepro.pot on each linux-v* release.

Adding a new translation

  1. Pick a locale code (e.g. de, pt_BR).

  2. Get the template (Where translators work, or Generating tablepro.pot), start xx.po from it and translate the entries:

    msginit --locale=xx --input=po/tablepro.pot --output=po/xx.po

  3. Add the code on its own line to LINGUAS once the translation is complete enough to ship. From then on:

    • the po Meson suite runs msgfmt --check on it. With gettext 0.26 or newer, as in CI's Translations job, that fails an entry whose translation drops or misspells a {name} placeholder;
    • the .deb and .rpm install it, and their smoke test starts tablepro --help under it and looks for its translation of "Open a new window".

  4. Compile and install it. The package build does this on its own. To test locally, put the catalogue where the build looks: the directory is built in from Meson's localedir, so point the prefix at a folder you can write and rebuild.

    meson configure _build --prefix="$HOME/.local"
meson compile -C _build
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/locale/xx/LC_MESSAGES
msgfmt po/xx.po -o ~/.local/share/locale/xx/LC_MESSAGES/tablepro.mo
LC_ALL=xx.UTF-8 meson devenv -C _build ./crates/app/tablepro

    glibc loads no catalogue at all under C or C.UTF-8, so testing a translation needs a real locale generated on the machine.

POTFILES.in

POTFILES.in lists every file xgettext reads. Regenerate it with:

git ls-files 'crates/app/src/*.rs' 'data/resources/*.ui' 'data/*.desktop.in.in' \
  'data/*.gschema.xml.in' 'data/*.metainfo.xml.in.in' > po/POTFILES.in

CI runs the same command and fails on a diff, so a new source file cannot silently drop out of translation.

Generating tablepro.pot

tablepro.pot is not committed, as in other GNOME apps. Generate it from the code before running msginit or msgmerge:

meson compile -C _build tablepro-pot

This needs gettext 1.0 or newer, the first release whose xgettext reads a call through a path such as crate::i18n::gettext(...), the way most of the app calls it. Ubuntu 26.10 ships 1.0; Fedora 44 ships 0.26 and Ubuntu 26.04 0.23.2. gettext 0.24 to 0.26 read Rust but skip every path-qualified call, and anything older falls back to its C lexer, which misreads lifetimes such as 'static as character constants. meson setup warns when the xgettext it found is too old.

Then fold new strings into existing translations:

for f in po/*.po; do msgmerge --update "$f" po/tablepro.pot; done

meson compile -C _build tablepro-update-po does both steps for every locale in LINGUAS.