How to do translations

From: Raphael Finkel (raphael@cs.uky.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 24 2003 - 15:36:29 EST

  • Next message: A.Pruszynski: "Re: How to do translations"

    Here is some prose that someone might want to place in po/README.TXT. I
    figured this material out by trial and error.

    Raphael 

    ----

    If you want to work on a particular language, say Zemblan (language zz-ZZ),
start this way:

        ./update.pl --pot
    mv abiword.pot zz-ZZ.po

    Now edit zz-ZZ.po.  Fix the comment at the start to indicate who you are, what
the language is, and when you are doing this work.

    Now you may translate all lines that start with msgid and place the translation
in place of the empty string in the following msgstr line.  For instance, you
might translate

        msgid "the dictionary"
    msgstr "grompabikku-la"

    (Sorry, my knowledge of Zemblan is limited.) Translate as many entries as you
like.  Entries that have %d or %s should most likely be translated with %d and
%s in place, referring to numeric or string data to be filled in later.  Don't
worry about very long lines.  If you like, you may divide long lines at blank
spaces:

        msgstr ""
    "implog revulam"
    "groppsigu moturo nula"

    Once you have translated as much as you want, run this script:

        ./ui-backport.pl zz-ZZ

    The next time you build AbiWord, the Zemblan strings will be available.

    Later, you will want to fix your translations, finish strings you didn't
translate earlier, and see if new strings have been introduced into AbiWord
that you need to translate.  Run this script:

        ./update.pl zz-ZZ

    You will be see a summary that tells you how many messages have been translated
and how many are still untranslated.  It will also indicate how many "fuzzy"
translations there are.  These are translations that you have made but which
may no longer be right, because AbiWord no longer uses quite the same text in
the message as it did when you first made the translation.  Search for the
word "fuzzy" in zz-ZZ.po and fix all such translations, if necessary.  Remove
the lines that say "fuzzy" to indicate that you have fixed them.  Then do
whatever other translations you want, and backport as indicated above.

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