Cacti maintains a philosophy of language translation aided by Google and Microsoft but supported and validated by our users. Part of the process involves using tools such as PO Edit Professional to provide hints to strings, and then posting those prepared language files to our Cacti Weblate site for users to correct or revise them.

The Cacti translations include two major directories that include the human readable and machine readable versions of the language translation per country and language. They are:

• <path_cacti>/locales/po - Holds cacti.pot file and various *.po files
• <path_cacti>/locales/LC_MESSAGES - Holds the various *.mo files

When making a pull request, if you are modifying human readable strings, it's important that the user modifying those strings to include an updated cacti.pot file in their pull requests. To update the cacti.pot file, you would simply follow the directions below:

• Change to the directory where you have found this README.md file
• Look for the script build_gettext.sh. If you find that it not executable, mark it so
• Then run the build_gettext.sh script.

This script will perform the following steps:

• Update the cacti.pot file from the entirety of the installed Cacti source directory
• Update your copy of the various language translation files (*.po) per country and language
• Update your copy of the various binary translation files (*.mo) per country and language

The the build_gettext.sh script updates both the *.po and *.mo files, those are not important for your pull requests as Weblate updates those files automatically as soon as it detects the change in the cacti.pot file from your pull request.

Periodically, a member of the Cacti Group will take the entirety of the *.po files and uses PO Edit Professional to perform automated translation of non-translated strings and then update the Weblate site directly from them. Those changes will be pushed back to the Cacti GitHub repository automatically.

First get yourself a login account at Cacti's Weblate site. From there, you can request a language translation be started. By doing so, this will automatically create a commit into the Cacti GitHub repository, which will be a signal to the team. Once we see the new translation, we may have a few additional steps that need to be required on the Cacti site. Someone from the Cacti Development team will reach out to you with those instructions.

Once the Cacti language translation file has been properly on boarded, you can use either PO Edit or the Weblate sites to make edits to the file. We find that if you are translating a new language, you should first let the Cacti Group do an automatic translation, of if you want to contribute to PO Edit Professionals development, you can pay for a license to facilitate a first pass language translation.

One of the key benefits of using Weblate, is that if you have created additional language translation files for Cacti plugins, you can translate common strings across all plugins simultaneously.