Monday, May 26, 2014

Translation Programs (PO file editors)



As mentioned in my previous post you can use a single text editor in order to translate a .PO file. However, it’s very helpful and easier for a simple (non programmer) translator to use a PO file editor instead, which gives much more automation, has a better and organized look and shows only things a translator needs to see.
Currently I use PoEdit for my translations, since it is simple and easy to use.
After a quick search, I found many PO editors available such as Virtaal, Gtranslator, Lokalize, OmegaT, GNU Gettext, GTed, betterpoeditor, Gorm and others.
Although all seem to do the same job, they have not the same features, each has its own ways of presenting and means of editing different elements of a message and many of them have extra helping tools like Translation memory, Glossary, Spell-checking etc.
Last week I tested some of them just to see how they would work for my workflow.
I summarized their characteristics on following table:   
 

As you can see the decision on which editor to choose for your work is not an easy one and each has pros and cons to be considered depending on your translation requirements.
I’m very glad I did all this research because I finally realized, that PoEdit may be simple to use, but has too few features for my needs, so I consider changing it with the Gtranslator or Virtaal application, which I can say both impressed me.


6 comments:

Unknown said...

I recently found that Emacs have very nice mode for editing PO files as well. I know it is not exactly user friendly choice for beginners but the experience was so positive I felt the urge to share it :)

Alexander E. Patrakov said...

Did you also translate proprietary software messages and/or non-software texts? If so, what tools did you use for that?

Daniel Mustieles said...

Hi Maria! I'd recommend you to use Gtranslator instead of PoEdit, because this one sometimes breaks internal structure of PO files.

Also, Gtranslator is the "official" GNOME's translation tool, altough it's maintainer is a bit missing, it's quite stable to use it ;-)

Thanks for your work!

Maria Mavridou said...

Sleep walker thank you for the information.
Alexander I have no experience in proprietary software. I've translated in the past mainly technical manuals and documentations which where document formatted and didn't need some kind of program (just a text editor).
Daniel I agree with you!! Gtranslator is easy to use and has a lot of extra features, but I still miss a glossary and would like to have a Project management overview which is helpful when you have to deal with many files at the same time.

Marx said...

Check out a free translating software PO Fast Translate -> http://communicator.pl/other_programs.html

summ3r said...

To manage the translation of PO files, I recommend the collaborative localization platform https://poeditor.com/