Existing AbiWord Translations

These instructions will allow you to update an existing AbiWord translation.

Step 1: Getting a Translation

First, you need to download a .po containing a specific translation. To do this, you will need to know the code for your language, (for example, fr-FR is French, es-ES is Spanish, it-IT is Italian...). Download the appropriate file from the translation status table on the right.

Now, you're all ready to edit the xx-YY.po file for your translation.

Step 2: Translate xx-YY.po

The file xx-YY.po contains several pairs of the form:

msgid "[english text]"
msgstr ""

All you need to do is fill in the msgstr part of this. For example, "Cancel" is "Cancelar" in Spanish, so the translation might look like this:

msgid "Cancel"
msgstr "Cancelar"

If you see the & sign, that means that this string appears in a menu. For example, the option "Header" would appear as "&Header". You can also provide underlines in your translation typing "&" before the character that you want to underline.

For example, "Header" translates to "Encabezado" in spanish. So, the translation might look like this:

msgid "&Header"
msgstr "&Encabezado"

Step 3: Submit the Translation

Once you have translated the file, please send it to the developer's mailing list so that we can incorporate your translation into the project.

You can subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to abiword-dev-request@abisource.com with the word "subscribe" in the mesage body. Once you're subscribed, you can send an email to abiword-dev@abisource.com and attach your translation. Please zip or gzip your attachment before sending it, otherwise it might be too large or marked as spam.