Potr (Po Translator) is a command line tool for translating Gettext PO files.

Currently, it supports translation using OpenAI, Azure OpenAI Service, and DeepL.

cargo install potr

To start translating the PO files and update the original file inplace, we can use the potr command:

potr -p <po-file> -e <engine> -t <target-languange> -k <api-key> ...

The target languange is defined using the ISO 639-1 code, e.g. en = English, zh = Chinese, de = German, fr = French, etc.

For examples:

# Translate en.po to English using DeepL
potr -p en.po -e deepl -t en -k <deepl-api-key>

# Tranlate en.po to English using OpenAI with GPT-4 (if not specified, we will use gpt-3.5-turbo by default)
potr -p en.po -e openai -t en -k <openai-api-key> -m gpt-4

Translation might take long time, but no worries, we can use Ctrl + C to stop processing further messages and the translated messages will be saved to the PO file.

By default, potr will skip certain messages, such as translated messages and code blocks (message starts with ```), we can use certain flags to control this behavior:

• --pt or --process-translated: Process translated messages
• --pc or --process-code-blocks: Process code blocks
• --skip-text: Skip normal text messages (non-code-blocks)
• --st or --skip-translation: Skip translation for all messages. This is useful when we only want to update the PO file with the current message to see format changes, etc.
• --source: Specify the source file regex for only translating messages from a specific source file.
• --include: Only translate messages that matches the include regex.
• --exclude: Skip messages that matches the exclude regex.
• -l or --limit: Limit the number of messages to translate. This is useful for testing purpose.

# Translate en.po to English using OpenAI, process translated messages, skip code blocks, and limit to 3 messages
potr -p en.po -e openai -t en -k <openai-api-key> -l 3 --pt

We can also specify the API key for each translation service using environment variables:

# DeepL API key
export POTR_API_KEY_DEEPL="..."

# OpenAI API key
export POTR_API_KEY_OPENAI="..."

# Azure OpenAI Service settings
export POTR_API_KEY_AZURE_OPENAI="..."
export POTR_API_BASE_AZURE_OPENAI="..."
export POTR_API_DEPLOYMENT_ID_AZURE_OPENAI="..."

Or, in Powershell on Windows:

# DeepL API key
$env:POTR_API_KEY_DEEPL="..."

# OpenAI API key
$env:POTR_API_KEY_OPENAI="..."

# Azure OpenAI Service settings
$env:POTR_API_KEY_AZURE_OPENAI="..."
$env:POTR_API_BASE_AZURE_OPENAI="..."
$env:POTR_API_DEPLOYMENT_ID_AZURE_OPENAI="..."

Beside translating messages in PO files, Potr also includes 2 tools for manipulating messages in PO files: Clear and Clone. Using the message skipping flags mentioned above, we can use these tools to clean up the PO files or clone certain messages in the PO files.

# Remove all current translations (--pc is not specified, so code blocks will be skipped by default)
potr -p en.po -e clear --pt

# Clone all code blocks as it is (process translated messages and code blocks, skip normal text messages)
potr -p en.po -e clone --pt --pc --skip-text

mdbook-i18n-helpers is an awesome tool for translating mdbook projects. We can use potr to translate the PO files generated by mdbook-i18n-helpers:

# Step 1: Update PO files in mdbook, after book is updated.

## Extracting messages.pot file from source
MDBOOK_OUTPUT='{"xgettext": {"pot-file": "messages.pot"}}' mdbook build -d po
## Update PO files for a specific language, say English (en)
msgmerge --update po/en.po po/messages.pot

# Step 2: Translate PO files using potr (using OpenAI for example)
potr -p po/en.po -e openai -t en -k <openai-api-key>

# Step 3: Reformat translated PO files
msgmerge --update po/en.po po/messages.pot

Potr is written in Rust. Building Potr is just like all the other rust projects:

cargo build

For running unit tests in Potr, we also need to have a valid API key for each translation service. The API keys are fetched from environment variables in the same way as we setup for the potr command. Please see "Usage" section above for more details.

Then, we can run the tests:

cargo test

Apache-2.0: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0