Localization of The PlatformIO Documentation

Announcement

Hello PlatformIO Community,

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

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

The goal of this project is to translate The PlatformIO 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, just follow the following steps:

1. Create an account on Crowdin Enterprise if you don't have one.
2. Log in and go the platformio-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 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:

• https://github.com/localizethedocs/platformio-docs-l10n/pull/2
• https://github.com/localizethedocs/platformio-docs-l10n/pull/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 @localizethedocs 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 platformio-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/platformio-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=develop
VERSION=latest
LANGUAGE=zh_TW
BUILDER=html
VENVDIR=$(pwd)/.conda

# Prepare the repository and environment
git clone --branch=${BRANCH} --depth=1 https://github.com/platformio/platformio-core.git platformio-core
cd platformio-core
conda create --prefix ${VENVDIR} --yes
conda activate ${VENVDIR}
conda install python=3.14 -c conda-forge -c nodefaults --yes
export PYTHONNOUSERSITE=1
python -m ensurepip --default-pip
cat << 'EOF' > requirements.txt
sphinx
sphinx-rtd-theme==3.0.2
sphinxcontrib-googleanalytics
sphinx-notfound-page
sphinx-copybutton
restructuredtext-lint
EOF
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

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

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

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

Related Discussions

There were discussions about translating The PlatformIO Documentation:

• https://github.com/platformio/platformio-docs/issues/21

Therefore, I believe the platformio-docs-l10n project should be able to serve this purpose.

This issue announces the external platformio-docs-l10n project rather than naming a change in platformio-docs. Review ci-sphinx-update-pot.yml and ci-gettext-update-po.yml, plus the Crowdin project, to understand the translation workflow; no completion criteria or concrete change are defined here.