Hunayn

A command-line companion and quality checker for GNOME translators.

Hunayn helps translation teams around the world work with Damned Lies from the terminal and catches translation mistakes before they reach a release.

Status: early development. hunayn check is released and ready to use; the Damned Lies commands do not exist yet.

Why "Hunayn"?

The project is named after Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), the most celebrated translator of Baghdad's House of Wisdom. He was famous not only for the amount he translated, but for his care: before translating a text, he collected several manuscripts, compared them and corrected their errors. Careful checking before publishing is exactly what this tool is about.

Checking PO files

Hunayn needs Python 3.10 or newer and has no other dependencies:

pip install hunayn

Then:

hunayn check az.po                     # report problems, exit 1 on errors
hunayn check po/*.po --format json     # for CI
hunayn check --ignore accelerator az.po
hunayn check --list-rules

Exit status: 0 no errors (warnings are allowed), 1 errors found (or any finding with --strict), 2 Hunayn could not run (a file is missing, an unknown rule was named).

Fuzzy messages are not checked unless you add --include-fuzzy. To silence a rule for one message, add a translator comment:

# hunayn: ignore=accelerator
msgid "_Open"
msgstr "Aç"

The rules, how each one was measured, and what they report are described in docs/rules.md.

What it is for

1. Talk to Damned Lies for you (not yet available)

Instead of opening many browser tabs:

hunayn status az                    # how complete is my team?
hunayn reserve gnome-maps main po az
hunayn get gnome-maps main po az    # download the latest PO file
hunayn submit az.po                 # check, then upload

Hunayn uses the official Damned Lies REST API with your personal API token, stored in your system keyring. It never asks for your password.

The final commit to a module's repository stays a human decision on Damned Lies. Hunayn only helps with the steps before it.

2. Check PO files for mistakes before they reach a release

Available now (see Checking PO files):

• broken or missing placeholders (%s, %1$d, %(name)s, {name})
• broken or changed markup (<b>…</b>, Mallard help tags and links)
• missing, empty or unreadable plural forms
• lost keyboard accelerators (_File)

Still to come: terminology that does not match your team's glossary.

Works interactively in the terminal and in GitLab/GitHub CI.

Built for every language

The core knows nothing about any single language. Each team describes its own conventions (quotation marks, accelerator style, punctuation, glossary) in a small data file, kept in a shared language repository where every team maintains its own folder.

Language data

Coming soon: a separate hunayn-languages repository with one folder per language code (az/, fr/, pt_BR/ …). Hunayn downloads the latest data when it runs and keeps a local copy for offline use. A team can also point Hunayn at a glossary in its own repository.

Roadmap

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. This project follows the GNOME Code of Conduct.

License

Hunayn is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.