PostgreSQL Chinese Message Catalogs

Complete zh_CN and zh_TW translations for PostgreSQL 14 – 19

162 files and 67,501 messages per language; 324 files and 135,002 messages in total. Both languages are 100% translated, with zero fuzzy and zero untranslated entries — every file clean under msgfmt --check --check-format.

The initial zh_CN baseline from pgtranslation/messages.git dated from 2019; its headers still read Project-Id-Version: postgres (PostgreSQL) 12. Across PostgreSQL 14 – 19 it carried a reviewed translation for 77.1% of messages; of the remaining 15,475, some 11,770 were fuzzy entries that babel matched by similarity and 3,705 were empty. This repository is a complete set rebuilt from the current templates, with terminology held to a single glossary shared across all catalogs and all six branches, and every message verified against its English original. How that was done is spelled out in How this was made.

Review Workbench

Every message is browsable at https://pgsql.cc/nls — the English original, the existing translation and the calibrated translation side by side, filterable by catalog, full-text searchable, with the real provenance of similar wordings. Corrections and second opinions are welcome there.

Upstream branch	PG	Catalogs	Messages	Initial upstream	Here	Workbench	Issue	Download
master	19	28	12,645	65.3%	100%	browse	#8123	tar.gz
REL_18_STABLE	18	28	12,099	69.9%	100%	browse	#8118	tar.gz
REL_17_STABLE	17	28	11,510	74.9%	100%	browse	#8119	tar.gz
REL_16_STABLE	16	26	10,657	79.0%	100%	browse	#8120	tar.gz
REL_15_STABLE	15	26	10,464	85.7%	100%	browse	#8121	tar.gz
REL_14_STABLE	14	26	10,126	91.8%	100%	browse	#8122	tar.gz

Catalog and message counts are per language and describe the current local catalogs; download links refer to the dated Simplified Chinese release below. The upstream percentages describe the initial zh_CN baseline.

The branch names link to the same catalogs as they stand today in the upstream translation repository, pgtranslation/messages.git:

git clone https://git.postgresql.org/git/pgtranslation/messages.git

PostgreSQL 19 lives on master there; there is no REL_19_STABLE. From PG17 on there are two extra catalogs, pg_combinebackup and pg_walsummary — of which pg_combinebackup is a new file for zh_CN.

Download

The links below identify a historical release. To build the current bilingual catalogs locally, see Usage.

Release 20260918 carries one archive per upstream branch plus the whole set. Each unpacks to zh_CN/<branch>/<catalog>.po, so a branch directory drops straight into messages.git. Since 20260917 only master has moved — two new REPACK messages in postgres.po; the other five branches are byte-identical.

Archive	Covers	Catalogs	Messages
pg-messages-zh_CN-20260918.tar.gz	all six branches	162	67,489
pg-messages-zh_CN-master-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 19	28	12,638
pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_18_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 18	28	12,098
pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_17_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 17	28	11,509
pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_16_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 16	26	10,656
pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_15_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 15	26	10,463
pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_14_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz	PostgreSQL 14	26	10,125

curl -LO https://github.com/pgsty/pgnls/releases/download/20260918/pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_18_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz
tar -xzf pg-messages-zh_CN-REL_18_STABLE-20260918.tar.gz
cp zh_CN/REL_18_STABLE/*.po /path/to/messages/zh_CN/

Checksums for every archive are in SHA256SUMS on the same release page.

Layout

zh_CN/<branch>/<catalog>.po       162 catalogs, one directory per upstream branch
zh_TW/<branch>/<catalog>.po       162 curated Traditional Chinese catalogs
ref/                              style guide, phrasebook, glossaries, process, errata
bin/                              standalone tools; Python 3, GNU gettext, GNU tar, gzip
Makefile                          the usual operations
LICENSE                           the PostgreSQL License, verbatim from postgres.git

Branches

Each view of the catalogs lives on its own branch:

Branch	Holds	Sync
main	this curated set, exported from the review database	manual
message	the raw state of pgtranslation/messages.git, verbatim	bin/sync-message.sh on that branch
babel	the aligned view babel.postgresql.org serves — the raw catalogs merged against each branch's current POT — as dated snapshots	bin/sync-babel.sh on that branch

The two views differ by design: translations on shared msgids are byte-identical, but the aligned view carries the day's msgid sets (new strings empty, reworded ones fuzzy-matched, dropped ones as #~) while the raw one keeps each translator's last word. main also carries the curated zh_TW/ catalogs: 67,501 messages across the same six branches, all translated.

Usage

make check            validate all 324 zh_CN/zh_TW catalogs (msgfmt, completeness, headers, alignment)
make stats            message counts per catalog per branch
make mo               compile both languages to .mo under build/<branch>/<language>/LC_MESSAGES/
make dist             15 release tarballs covering both languages, plus SHA256SUMS, under dist/<date>/
make redmine          flat catalog files under dist/<date>/redmine/<language>/<branch>/
make fetch-upstream   pull a fresh zh_CN snapshot from babel into tmp/
make diff             compare zh_CN/ against that snapshot: msgid drift and coverage
make check-align      column alignment by East Asian display width, on its own
make show BRANCH=master CATALOG=psql
make clean            remove compiled build/ while preserving release assets in dist/

make dist requires GNU tar (gtar on macOS), gzip and shasum. It creates one bilingual archive, one complete archive per language, and six branch archives per language, plus SHA256SUMS. Each archive contains only PO files preserving <language>/<branch>/<catalog>.po. The repository's LICENSE and compiled MO files are not included. make mo compiles all 324 catalogs separately for local use.

Set STAMP to choose the release label and DIST to choose the output directory:

STAMP=20260930 make dist
# Or build another copy in a fresh directory:
STAMP=20260930 DIST=/tmp/pgnls-20260930 make dist

The default output directory is dist/<STAMP>/. Existing release files are never overwritten; choose a fresh directory to rebuild. Archive member order, ownership, permissions and timestamps are normalized, and gzip timestamps are omitted. SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH defaults to the current Git commit timestamp; when building an exported source tree without .git, pass that timestamp explicitly. The same PO files, stamp, epoch and archive tools produce identical archives.

For a PGWeb installation with the language migration applied, generate a language-scoped review bundle from the curated catalogs and the matching Babel snapshot:

python3 bin/pgweb-bundle.py --language zh_TW \
  --upstream tmp/babel-snapshot/download/zh_TW --output /tmp/nls-zh_TW.jsonl.gz
# In the pgweb checkout:
.venv/bin/python manage.py nls_import /tmp/nls-zh_TW.jsonl.gz --check
.venv/bin/python manage.py nls_import /tmp/nls-zh_TW.jsonl.gz

The default is PG14–19; repeat --major to select versions. English message sets must match the snapshot. Candidates start pending, with the Babel translation kept alongside the curated PO text; review decisions remain independent per language. Re-importing preserves existing human review state. Historical zh_CN IDs must be retained when refreshing an existing database; the importer rejects new IDs for a source message that already exists. Bundle tests run with python3 -m unittest discover -s tests.

To land these in messages.git, check out the matching branch and overwrite zh_CN/:

cp zh_CN/REL_18_STABLE/*.po /path/to/messages/zh_CN/

make redmine prepares separate language and branch directories containing <catalog>-zh_CN.po or <catalog>-zh_TW.po, using the same bytes as the source catalogs. Its default output is dist/<STAMP>/redmine/; set OUT to use another directory. These flat submission files are separate from the release tarballs.

History

The first commit holds the catalogs exactly as they stand upstream, merged by babel against each branch's current POT so the message sets already match. Every commit after it calibrates one catalog across all of its branches, so the diff for any component reads on its own:

git log --oneline                          # one commit per catalog
git show <commit>                          # what changed in that catalog
git diff $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD) -- zh_CN/master/psql.po

How this was made

Machine-assisted translation, verified and reviewed by a human — not hand translation, which is what the pgsql-translators thread was told before any of it started.

A glossary and style guide were fixed first. Each message then went through eight to ten rounds of translation and cross-review between models (Codex, Astra, Fable 5.1), every round held to that baseline and gated on msgfmt, placeholder, plural and column-alignment checks. A complete human review pass came last, message by message against the English, on the workbench.

The baseline is published in ref/: the style guide (rules R1–R14), the phrasebook (95 rules, each with the required and forbidden Chinese), two glossaries and the per-term decision log. ref/process.md has the long version; ref/errata.md has the known defects.

File handling

• Templates — the babel po-{14..19}-branch snapshot checked on 2026-09-30. Both languages carry the snapshot's per-file POT-Creation-Date and active-message source references (#:). make fetch-upstream && make diff tells you at any time whether zh_CN/ still matches the current upstream POT entry for entry.
• Only what should change — translation edits affect msgstr values, fuzzy flags, and #| previous-message comments. Explicit template refreshes synchronize POT-Creation-Date and source references (#:) while preserving translations and PO-Revision-Date. Extracted comments (#.), msgctxt, other flags, entry order and obsolete #~ entries are preserved byte for byte.
• Plurals — normalised to the Chinese standard nplurals=1; plural=0;. The existing headers disagree: postgres and psql declared 1, nine directories declared 2, and libpq and initdb carried plural entries with no Plural-Forms header at all. pg_dump's circular foreign-key warning uses the number-neutral wording 以下表涉及循环外键约束: so the single Chinese plural form covers both self-references within one table and cycles among multiple tables.
• Consistency — one glossary governs the whole set, so similar English strings read consistently across every catalog and every branch, which is what makes six branches reviewable as one body of work rather than six.

Catalog headers

The current zh_CN and zh_TW catalogs for PostgreSQL 14–19 are a complete replacement translation produced in 2026. All 324 files use this comment template, with the language variant and component adjusted to match the file:

# Simplified Chinese message translation file for pg_combinebackup
# Copyright (C) 2026 PostgreSQL Global Development Group
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PostgreSQL package.
#
# Ruohang Feng (vonng@pigsty) <rh@vonng.com>, 2026.
#

Historical translator credits precede the current credit. Preserve their names, email addresses, contribution dates and relative order, using # Name <email>, YYYY. or # Name <email>, YYYY-MM-DD.. These credits acknowledge earlier contributions; their dates do not imply participation in the 2026 retranslation. Restore missing credits only from evidence for the same catalog, such as its historical Last-Translator field. A Language-Team field alone is not an author list.

The copyright year identifies this complete retranslation; keep it at 2026 for this edition rather than copying a template's old year or advancing it merely because the calendar changes. Keep Last-Translator as Ruohang Feng <rh@vonng.com>; the Pigsty identifier belongs in the author comment. Set PO-Revision-Date to the actual revision time with its timezone, and preserve the other machine header fields when changing comments. make check validates the comment template as well as the machine fields.

The old public-domain comments in Simplified Chinese initdb, pg_config, pg_ctl and pgscripts came from the early --foreign-user template. PostgreSQL changed the generator to use PGDG in 2009, and the Spanish catalogs have a 2010 normalization precedent. The unified header describes the current retranslation; it does not change the status of earlier public-domain material. Bao Wei's restored credits in those four catalogs come from their Last-Translator and revision dates in the 2005 initial import.

Submitting upstream

Submitted the way the NLS wiki asks for it: one Redmine issue per branch (numbers in the table above), with attachments named <catalog>-zh_CN.po. They supersede #8117, an earlier issue covering the 19 branch alone.

• Where files go — the Redmine patch tracker; issues are readable without an account, filing and commenting need a PostgreSQL community account.
• Where discussion happens — pgsql-translators@lists.postgresql.org (thread).
• Status board — babel.postgresql.org is read-only and accepts no files; its percentages only move once a committer merges into messages.git.

License

The translations follow PostgreSQL itself and are available under the PostgreSQL License, the same terms as the software they ship with.

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Ruohang Feng <rh@vonng.com> · 2026-09

Catalogs last updated: 2026-09-29 22:12+0800 · zh_CN / zh_TW · PostgreSQL 14–19