Using gettext tools to make translations easier

The PO file format is part of the gettext i18n and localization system that’s commonly used in Unix-like systems. This system includes tools to ease translation work.

This recipe demonstrates how to use these tools to help translate our add-on modules. We want to use it on a custom module, so the my_hostel module we created in Chapter 3, Creating Odoo Add-On Modules, is a good candidate. However, feel free to replace it with some other custom module you have at hand, replacing the tutorials’ my_hostel references as appropriate.

How to do it...

To manage translations from the command line, assuming that your Odoo installation is at ~/odoo-work/odoo, follow these steps:

1. Create a compendium of translation terms for the target language – for example, Spanish. If we name our compendium file odoo_es.po, we should write the following code:

   $ cd ~/odoo-work/odoo  # Use the path to your Odoo installation...