Official localization process: .po or .archive?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

We read the documentation about localization, and have trouble finding what is the official (recommended) localization process. What is unclear, is when we make translations, should we edit the .archive or .po files ?

For instance, the official documentation states that the archive file should be used to integrate translations :

Archives should be provided, as-is or
converted into other formats, to
translators for processing and
returned with translations in place of
empty stub entries.

However, we can find here

that those files are not intended to be edited:

I would recommend that as the easiest
approach. The archives weren’t really
intended for manual editing by
translators

We understand that this means that po file should be edited.

What is the real way to process, edit the .po or .archive file ?

Thanks,

Note: here a sample of the current commandlet configuration we are using, which to what we understand the same than the one in the documentation, except one step inverted.

;Gather text from assets
[GatherTextStep1]
CommandletClass=GatherTextFromAssets
IncludePaths=./Content/*
ExcludePaths=*/Content/Localization/*
PackageExtensions=*.umap
PackageExtensions=*.upk
PackageExtensions=*.uasset
bFixBroken=false

;Write Manifest
[GatherTextStep2]
CommandletClass=GenerateGatherManifest

;Write Archives
[GatherTextStep3]
CommandletClass=GenerateGatherArchive
bPurgeOldEmptyEntries=true

;Import localized PO files
[GatherTextStep4]
CommandletClass=InternationalizationExport
bImportLoc=true

;Write Localized Text Resource
[GatherTextStep5]
CommandletClass=GenerateTextLocalizationResource
ResourceName=Game.locres

;Export  PO files
[GatherTextStep6]
CommandletClass=InternationalizationExport
bExportLoc=true

;Write Text Localization Report
[GatherTextStep7]
CommandletClass=GenerateTextLocalizationReport
DestinationPath=.\WordCounts
bConflictReport=true
ConflictReportName=GameConflicts.txt
2

Hi CodingMarmot,

The first documentation link is unfortunately, incorrect. While it is possible to translate archives directly, archives themselves are not in a format ideal for translation as most of the context for the string is in an entirely different file (thus that information isn’t duplicated per language). This makes translating the archives directly much harder.

I highly recommend exporting to po files instead. There are many tools, free and otherwise, that are capable of handling the po format which will give you a much better translation experience.

I’d also like to draw your attention to the release of the Localization Dashboard in 4.8, which though still a work in-progress simplifies a lot of the localization process.

Here’s a walk through of the process if you’re interested:

There are some bugs in the 4.8 Preview version which has problems if your project exists within a path that contains spaces in the name, but we’ve addressed that for the next release - which will probably be the official 4.8 release.

3

Thanks for your answer!