~ hewwo ~

This is a set of translations for yay, pacman, and libalpm from English to Nyanspeak (aka Catgirl speak).

It was inspired by Nyarch Linux's alias of nyay for yay.

Being translation files, this does not require recompiling yay, pacman, or libalpm. It also will not touch the English translations, as it is an entirely new locale named "en_NYA".

screenshot

The original translation files were taken from yay's repo at commit 103b22c8 (committed 2026年02月03日) and pacman's repo at commit a6f7467d (committed 2026年01月25日).

Happy catgirling~

Repo contents

yay.po, pacman.po, libalpm.po have been translated from en, en_GB, and en_GB, respectively.

install.fish is a fish script to make things easier. You should at least open it and read it before running it to know what it is doing.

nyay.fish is a fish function with a cute message, but it is not required; all you need is to preface executing yay (or pacman) with LANG=en_NYA.UTF-8. If you wanted to instead edit Nyarch's /usr/local/bin/nyay script, just make the change like so:

#!/bin/bash

LANG=en_NYA.UTF-8 yay "$@"

nya_translate_msgstr_only.py is a script my machine generated for me whilst translating pacman and libalpm. It needs more refinement.

Updating the translations

Honestly I've probably already put more time into this than I should so I don't have a script to assist with this.

Be aware, yay.po, as it is now, was not generated with the Python script. My machine translated this file in-place first, which is why it has even more intricate nyan-isms and cute emoticons & emojis. So running it on the yay translation file will not produce the same result. This is regrettable and something I'd like to fix if, again, I hadn't already sunk too much time into this.

Here should be the steps:

1. Clone this repo (duh) and change to its directory
2. Get the latest translations from the upstream repositories

• curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jguer/yay/refs/heads/next/po/en.po -o /tmp/yay.po
• curl https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/raw/master/src/pacman/po/en_GB.po -o /tmp/pacman.po
• curl https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/raw/master/lib/libalpm/po/en_GB.po -o /tmp/libalpm.po

3. Retranslate the files

• As previously stated, the Python script will not work with yay's .mo file...sorry
• python nya_translate_msgstr_only.py /tmp/pacman.po pacman.po
• python nya_translate_msgstr_only.py /tmp/libalpm.po libalpm.po

4. Undo the changes to the header comments & translator info of the po files

• At the very least you MUST change "Language: en\n" or "Language: en_GB\n" to "Language: en_NYA\n"
• The rest is optional, but just know better than to go complaining to the English translators for any en_NYA-related issues

5. Run ./install.fish to update your system, or peek at its internals and yoink out the needed lines to generate the MO files and move them to their respective locations

Future Goals

1. Get the Python script to produce the high-quality translations such as what yay.po has now
2. Create a proper Pacman package (aka PKGBUILD) for the translations
3. Get the package accepted into the Nyarch package repository

• (I'm only mostly joking)

4. Buy some new cute long socks