We are working on a very large project and therefore have thousands of source files with about 12k strings to translate into various languages. In order to keep track we read the generated .ts files into a database and export / import from there to portions we can give to external resources for translation.

For this processing we want to have absolute file paths in our .ts files.

The used call is:

lupdate -recursive -locations absolute -no-obsolete -source-language en_US -target-language <lang> <project-path> -ts <output file path>

The result looks like:

<TS version="2.1" language="de_DE" sourcelanguage="en_US">
<context>
<name>ApplicationMainWindow</name>
<message>
<location filename="../../../XYZ/share/widgets/XYZwindow.ui" line="90"/>
<location filename="../../../XYZ/share/widgets/XYZwindow.ui" line="90"/>
<location filename="../../../XYZ/share/widgets/XYZwindow.ui" line="59"/>
<location filename="../../../XYZ/share/widgets/XYZwindow.ui" line="90"/>
<source>Time Line</source>
<translation type="unfinished"></translation>
</message>

[...]

We would expect these paths to be absolute.