gitlab-org--gitlab-foss/doc/development/i18n/merging_translations.md

Merging translations from Crowdin

Crowdin automatically syncs the gitlab.pot file presenting newly added translations to the community of translators.

At the same time, it creates a merge request to merge all newly added & approved translations. Find the merge request created by gitlab-crowdin-bot to see new and merged merge requests. They are created in EE and need to be ported to CE manually.

Validation

By default Crowdin commits translations with [skip ci] in the commit message. This is done to avoid a bunch of pipelines being run. Before merging translations, make sure to trigger a pipeline to validate translations, we have static analysis validating things Crowdin doesn't do. Create a new pipeline for the master-i18n branch.

If there are validation errors, the easiest solution is to disapprove the offending string in Crowdin, leaving a comment with what is required to fix the offense. There is an issue suggesting to automate this process. Disapproving will exclude the invalid translation, the merge request will be updated within a few minutes.

It might be handy to pause the integration on the Crowdin side for a little while so translations don't keep coming. This can be done by clicking Pause sync on the Crowdin integration settings page.

When all failures are resolved, the translations need to be double checked once more as discussed in confidential issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/issues/37850.

Merging translations

When all translations are found good and pipelines pass the translations can be merged into the master branch. After that is done, create a new merge request cherry-picking the translations from EE to CE. When merging the translations, make sure to check the Remove source branch checkbox, so Crowdin recreates the master-i18n from master after the new translation was merged.

We are discussing automating this entire process here.

Recreate the merge request

Crowdin creates a new merge request as soon as the old one is closed or merged. But it won't recreate the master-i18n branch every time. To force Crowdin to recreate the branch, close any open merge request and delete the master-18n.

This might be needed when the merge request contains failures that have been fixed on master.