How do I merge .po files?

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hello everyone,

I’m currently stuck with the following problem:

I have two 「de.po」 files belonging to different branches
of the same code:
• one from foo-project 5.0, almost fully translated
• one from a customisation (not quite fork, more like stable
  branch plus production-use patches) of foo-project 4.8

The latter does contain translations not in the 5.0 file,
or better ones for some of them, but doesn’t contain a lot
of translations that are in the 5.0 one. It might be possible
to get a “base” version common to both of them, but since .po
merging is different from e.g. CVS merging, I don’t see the
point in it.

Both msgmerge (throws away all translations from the 4.8 one)
and msgcat seem to be not quite what I need, only close.

I would like to get a merged version of the both (the 4.8 based
one has correct file location information), maybe a couple of
questions in corner cases but not asked for every single one:
$ fgrep -c msgid de.po
2689

That would be quite a lot. Afterwards, the resulting file will
go to a cow-orker who’ll be translating what is still untrans-
lated (but almost certainly not looking at every single already
translated string either), using KBabel, then it will be used,
so the process shouldn’t make anything worse if possible ☺

FWIW, it’s mostly PHP code and, yes, everything is GPL and the
source is available, but it shouldn’t matter for the question
as it’s pretty general.


Thanks in advance,
//mirabilos
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