Strings not loading in after synchronizing repository and rescanning

[lschaepers]

Describe the issue

After I synchronized the Weblate repository with my GitLab repository, which contains gettext .pot and .po translation files, there were no strings shown in the UI. But when I downloaded the translation files of the component they matched exactly with the ones in my GitLab repository.

I've read other issues where rescan in the maintenance tab would fix this problem but it seems to have no effect in my instance.

I already tried

• I've read and searched the documentation.
• I've searched for similar filed issues in this repository.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Push updated translation files to GitLab
2. Go to Repository maintenance
3. Update
4. Rescan
5. Download translation files Files > Download translation files as ZIP file
6. Downloaded translation files match with files in GitLab
7. Can't find strings: No strings found!

Expected behavior

After updating the Weblate repository and rescanning to load translations from the files into Weblate, the strings should be shown in Weblate UI.

Screenshots

No response

Exception traceback

How do you run Weblate?

Docker container

Weblate versions

• Weblate: 5.11.4
• Django: 5.2.1
• siphashc: 2.5
• translate-toolkit: 3.15.2
• lxml: 5.4.0
• pillow: 11.2.1
• nh3: 0.2.21
• python-dateutil: 2.9.0.post0
• social-auth-core: 4.6.1
• social-auth-app-django: 5.4.3
• django-crispy-forms: 2.4
• oauthlib: 3.2.2
• django-compressor: 4.5.1
• djangorestframework: 3.16.0
• django-filter: 25.1
• django-appconf: 1.1.0
• user-agents: 2.2.0
• filelock: 3.18.0
• RapidFuzz: 3.13.0
• openpyxl: 3.1.5
• celery: 5.5.2
• django-celery-beat: 2.8.0
• kombu: 5.5.3
• translation-finder: 2.19
• weblate-language-data: 2025.5
• html2text: 2025.4.15
• pycairo: 1.28.0
• PyGObject: 3.52.3
• diff-match-patch: 20241021
• requests: 2.32.3
• django-redis: 5.4.0
• hiredis: 3.1.0
• sentry-sdk: 2.27.0
• Cython: 3.0.12
• mistletoe: 1.4.0
• GitPython: 3.1.44
• borgbackup: 1.4.1
• pyparsing: 3.2.3
• ahocorasick_rs: 0.22.2
• python-redis-lock: 4.0.0
• charset-normalizer: 3.4.2
• cyrtranslit: 1.1.1
• drf-spectacular: 0.28.0
• Python: 3.13.3
• Git: 2.49.0
• psycopg: 3.2.7
• psycopg-binary: 3.2.7
• phply: 1.2.6
• ruamel.yaml: 0.18.10
• tesserocr: 2.8.0
• boto3: 1.38.10
• aeidon: 1.15
• iniparse: 0.5
• mysqlclient: 2.2.7
• google-cloud-translate: 3.20.2
• openai: 1.77.0
• Mercurial: 7.0.2
• git-svn: 2.49.0
• git-review: 2.4.0
• PostgreSQL server: 17.5
• Database backends: django.db.backends.postgresql
• PostgreSQL implementation: psycopg3 (binary)
• Cache backends: default:RedisCache, avatar:FileBasedCache
• Email setup: django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend: 127.0.0.1
• OS encoding: filesystem=utf-8, default=utf-8
• Celery: redis://cache:6379/1, redis://cache:6379/1, regular
• Platform: Linux 5.15.153.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2 (x86_64)

Weblate deploy checks

SystemCheckError: System check identified some issues:

CRITICALS:
?: (weblate.E003) Cannot send e-mail ([Errno 111] Connection refused), please check EMAIL_* settings.
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/install.html#out-mail
?: (weblate.E009) The Celery tasks queue is too long, either the worker is not running, or is too slow.
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/install.html#celery
?: (weblate.E012) The server e-mail address should be changed from its default value
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/install.html#production-email
?: (weblate.E019) The Celery does not process tasks, or is too slow in processing them.
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/install.html#celery

WARNINGS:
?: (security.W004) You have not set a value for the SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS setting. If your entire site is served only over SSL, you may want to consider setting a value and enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security. Be sure to read the documentation first; enabling HSTS carelessly can cause serious, irreversible problems.
?: (security.W008) Your SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT setting is not set to True. Unless your site should be available over both SSL and non-SSL connections, you may want to either set this setting True or configure a load balancer or reverse-proxy server to redirect all connections to HTTPS.
?: (security.W012) SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE is not set to True. Using a secure-only session cookie makes it more difficult for network traffic sniffers to hijack user sessions.

INFOS:
?: (weblate.I021) Error collection is not set up, it is highly recommended for production use
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/install.html#collecting-errors
?: (weblate.I028) Backups are not configured, it is highly recommended for production use
        HINT: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/backup.html

System check identified 9 issues (5 silenced).

Additional context

No response

[nijel]

• How is your component configured?
• Are the PO files valid? Can you share them?

[lschaepers]

1. Component configuration

• Source language: English
• Version control system: Git
• Source code repository: GitLab SSH link
• Repository push URL: same as source code repo
• File format: gettext PO file
• File mask: locales/LC_MESSAGES/*.po
• Monolingual base language file: -
• Intermediate language file: -
• Adding new translation: Create new language file
• Template for new translations: locales/template.pot
• Language code style: Default based on the file format
• Language filter: ^[^.]+$ (default)
• Key filter: -
  Hope that's enough

2. The PO files should be valid
   The .pot is generated by: xgettext --language=C++ --from-code=UTF-8 --keyword=_ --add-comment=TRANSLATORS --output=locales/template.pot public/*.cc
   The .po files were initialized by: msginit --locale=$ll.UTF-8 --input=locales/template.pot --output=locales/LC_MESSAGES/$ll.po
   And updated by: msgmerge --update --backup=off locales/LC_MESSAGES/$ll.po locales/template.pot

In the attached PO file I redacted some minor parts.

Hope that helps identifying the problem. Thanks in advance.

PO_test_file.zip

[nijel]

I don't see anything problematic here. Is your Weblate server working correctly (check /manage/performance/)?

[lschaepers]

Here are the errors that are shown on this page but I think they are the same as the SystemCheckErrors in the original post.

[lschaepers]

Maybe this information is any help:
If I upload the .po translation file via Any language > Files > Upload translation > Replace existing translation file or wlc upload --method replace and only if the uploaded file differs from the existing file will the shown strings in the UI be updated.

So my current workaround looks like this:

• After I uploaded source code to my git repository the CI pipeline executes a script that updates the .po files with gettext
• Because Weblate is currently only available on my localhost I pull the updated translation files
• A script then uses wlc upload --method replace to upload every .po file in the repository

I guess this is fine to test the workflow and working with Weblate in general but I would like to see it working how it is supposed to.

[nijel]

The Celery queues are definitely the root cause here, please see https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/install.html#celery