Volunteering for the zh_CN message translation

Hi all,

I'd like to volunteer for the Simplified Chinese (zh_CN) message
catalogs, if the project is open to a new translator taking them on.

Briefly: I'm Ruohang Feng (Vonng), a native Chinese speaker, more than
ten years with PostgreSQL. I maintain pgsql.cc, a full Chinese translation
of the PostgreSQL documentation for v10 through v20, held together by
a single glossary so the same English sentence reads the same way
across versions. I've translated several technical books into Chinese,
including Designing Data-Intensive Applications and PostgreSQL
Internals, and I maintain Pigsty, an OSS PostgreSQL distribution.

I've been following the translation tooling discussion Peter started
around PGConf.dev 2026, and Thom's July note that several catalogs,
zh_CN among them, are at risk of being dropped from 19. On today's
19-branch status table zh_CN is at 66% overall, with nine of
twenty-eight catalogs above the threshold; postgres is at 61%, psql at
75%, libpq at 12%.

Coverage isn't the whole problem. The current zh_CN catalogs appear to
have been translated against a much older baseline, and they carry a
fair number of outright errors, several of them reported on this list
this year, plus terminology that varies between files and sometimes
within a single file.

I've set up a translation and proofreading workflow for the message at

https://pgsql.cc/nls,

and a first-pass base version of the 19 catalogs is already in place.

To be explicit about what that is: it is LLM-translated by fable & astra,
generated against the same glossary that backs the pg cn doc site.
It is working material, and I would not submit it as it stands.

Once I have a go-ahead, that base goes through a full human review --
every message checked by hand against the English original and the
current translation -- and only the reviewed, msgfmt-clean result is
sent to this list. That review is the bulk of the work, which is why
I'm asking before starting it rather than afterwards.

Two ways I could go from here:

1. Full overhaul. I take the whole of zh_CN through that review, keep
what's good in the existing translations, and submit complete PO
files in time for 19. This is what I'd prefer: most of the
inconsistency is cross-file, and one pass against a fixed glossary
fixes it in a way incremental patches won't.

2. Minimal fixes. I fill in the untranslated messages and correct the
clear errors, and leave everything else as it stands.

Either is fine by me -- I'd rather follow whatever the project prefers
to review. If this sounds workable, a few things I'd need to know:

- Is anyone already working on zh_CN that I should coordinate with?
- Should corrections be back-patched to the supported branches
(18 and earlier), or is it better to keep everything on 19?
- What's the cutoff for getting updates into 19?

If it's easier to judge from a sample, I can send one reviewed catalog first.

Thanks,
Ruohang Feng (Vonng)
rh(at)vonng(dot)com