Contributing Japanese Translations to Odoo and OCA with Weblate

A working guide to improving the Japanese translation of Odoo core and OCA modules through the Weblate translation platform. These slides are in Japanese. Translation is the easiest way into community contribution — no code required — and the deck walks through it screen by screen.

Odoo and OCA both use Weblate, but they differ in how you register and how changes land. The deck treats the two separately.

Translating Odoo core

• How it works — Odoo's in-house team manages the translation, which syncs to the Odoo GitHub repository every few days. Anyone outside that team submits suggestions, which appear once approved
• Getting set up — register an account, then apply to translations@odoo.com. Vetting has tightened, so include your company, ERP background, and translation experience
• If you have no Odoo environment for translating, runbot works as one
• How Weblate is organised — a project maps to an Odoo version, a component maps to a module
• Finding the right module — use developer mode to inspect the field; its "related module" is the Weblate component
• Writing search queries — source: for the English, target: for the translation, component: and project: (the project slug, not its name). Append = for an exact match
• A warning about markup — never alter tags inside the source string. Removing one causes a runtime error in Odoo
• Which versions to fix — submit to every major version and to the newest SaaS version. New releases take their translations from the latest SaaS build, so skipping it leaves the old wording in place
• Quality conventions — half-width colons and parentheses, polite form for errors and help text, plain form for field descriptions, and consistent terminology checked against past translations rather than loosely reinterpreted
• Uploading translation files per component (suggestion mode only), and refreshing translations inside Odoo afterwards

Translating OCA modules

• How it differs from Odoo — a project is a repository-and-version pair, the sync to GitHub runs daily, and your change lands without waiting for approval
• Getting set up — register with a GitHub account, then email transbot@odoo-community.org with the language you want (about a week to process)
• Where a component has no Japanese yet, add the language yourself before translating
• Because OCA work tends to be module by module, downloading and uploading the translation file is the practical route

Related links

• Odoo's translation platform (Weblate)
• OCA's translation platform (Weblate)
• Odoo's translation guide (GitHub Wiki)