New AbiWord Translation

These instructions will allow you to translate AbiWord for a language that does not have an existing translation yet.

Step 1: Download AbiWord via CVS

There are Instructions for using Subversion to download AbiWord's source code. You only really need the abiword module. Quick instructions would be:

$ svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/trunk abiword


Step 2: Build a New Translation File

Now we're going to build a file called abiword.pot. This file is basically a blank translation of AbiWord's strings.

To do this, we'll go into the abiword/po directory and run the "update.pl" script as follows:

$ cd abiword/po
$ ./update.pl --pot

This should produce the file abiword.pot.

Now we want to go ahead and make the new translation file. All you need to do is rename abiword.pot to the form xx-YY.po where xx-YY is your language code (for example, fr-FR is French, es-ES is Spanish, it-IT is Italian...)

$ mv abiword.pot xx-YY.po

Step 3: 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 4: 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. Please zip the attachment before sending it, as that will be more convenient for users on slow internet connections, and to prevent it from being marked as spam my our mail server.

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.