# Translation templates

Warning

The whole concept around templates has been redefined in version 2.7, and what’s described in this page doesn’t work as expected for the time being. The related work is tracked in issue 3877.

Translation templates are translation files that contain only the source text (original text). These files are used as a template to create target files for each language.

Users familiar with Gettext know translation templates as POT files. For other bilingual formats (like XLIFF) untranslated files with the same extension will be used as templates.

## The “Templates” language

Pootle has a special language called templates. This is not strictly speaking a language but rather a place to store translation templates for a project.

If the templates language is absent from a project, Pootle will assume files under the project’s source language are translation templates.

Gettext PO projects should always use a templates project where POT files can be uploaded. For simple projects it will be simpler to use the source language.

## Starting a new translation

When adding a new language to a project, Pootle will first scan the file system and look for translation files for that language. If none are present a fresh copy will be generated based on the templates files (in a manner similar to pot2po).