SHORT GUIDE ABOUT TRANSLATING MESSAGES
$Id: I18N 13096 2007-03-15 17:12:47Z cbiere $

0. LICENSE AND AUTHORS
======================

This document is provided under the Creative Commons Public License
2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/). It is based on
the contributions by the following authors:

Christian Biere (cbiere at users.sourceforge.net)
Thomas Schuerger (trancetip at users.sourceforge.net)
Murphy (eqom14 at users.sourceforge.net)
Daichi Kawahata (daichik at users.sourceforge.net)


1. INTRO
========

This is a short summary of the gettext documentation. See the
APPENDIX if this information isn't sufficient for you.


2. Get the editor
=================

You can use a text editor Emacs with `po-mode', Vim with ftplugin
`po.vim' or a graphical PO file editor like `poEdit
(requires wxWidgets)', `gtranslator (requires GNOME)', `KBabel (requires
KDE)', these editor have special features for editing PO file. You can
use normal editor like Vi of course, but it's highly recommended using
one of those editors.

Here's the links:

    o Emacs PO mode - Major mode for GNU gettext PO files.
      http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_10.html

    o Vim po.vim - A ftplugin for easier editing of GNU gettext PO files.
      http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=695

    o poEdit - A cross-platform gettext catalogs editor.
      http://www.poedit.org/

    o gtranslator - The GNOME 2.x translation making program.
      http://gtranslator.sourceforge.net/

    o KBabel - An advanced and easy to use PO-file editor.
      http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/

If you are going to keep contributing your translation work, you might
want to be familiar with one of those above.


3. Extract the translatable strings from the source files:
==========================================================

Update your source files to the latest version from CVS.

Then extract the strings:

    $ cd po
    $ make update-po
    $ cp gtk-gnutella.pot messages.po

If you look at the source files, you'll find many strings which are not marked
as translatable. The reason for this is that these strings are only used
internally or they are only interesting for developers i.e., for debugging.


4. Prepare the PO file:
=======================

Use your favorite editor and edit the first lines of
``messages.po'' to match these:

    "Project-Id-Version: gtk-gnutella VERSION\n"
    "POT-Creation-Date: 2003-04-15 23:20+0200\n"
    "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
    "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
    "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
    "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
    "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
    "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

Replace VERSION, YEAR, MO etc. with reasonable values. It's important
that you use ``charset=UTF-8'' as above. If your editor doesn't
support UTF-8 don't mind, you can convert that later.


5. Translate the messages:
==========================

You can use a text editor or a graphical PO file editor like "poEdit" for
editing the translations (includes UTF-8 support), see
http://poedit.sourceforge.net.

In the PO file you'll find something like this:

    #: main.c:42
    msgid "Hello world"
    msgstr ""

If you want to translate to German, you would change the 3rd line
to the following:

    msgstr "Hallo Welt"

Don't touch the string behind ``msgid''! If you find typos or
the like, this string must be corrected in the source file.
If you see a string with a ``%'' in it, then leave the part with
``%'' as-is and don't change the order of these ``words''.
Also keep the character after an backslash ``\'' as-is.
For example:

    msgid "%-8s are %d time faster than %s.\n"
    msgstr "%-8s sind %d mal schneller als %s.\n"

See man printf(3) for details about the syntax, if you have
problems with it.

You don't have to translate every message. If you cannot or don't
want to translate a message just leave ``msgstr ""'' as-is. Don't
copy the string of msgid!

There are sometimes strings that are not meant to be translated
(e.g., "window14" or the like) but appear in the PO file nonetheless.
This is caused by glade which tags all strings translatable. Also
as a rule of thumb, strings that contain multiple underscores are
usually used as internal place holders (e.g., "PROP_IP_CHANGED").

However, some strings contain a single underscore (e.g., "_File"). In
this case the underscore declares the following letter as accelerator
key. In this example, the key combination <Alt>+F or sometimes
<Control>+F would activate the GUI element associated with this string.
You should use an appropriate character as accelerator in the translation
as well, just prepend an underscore to selected character:

    msgid "Save _File"
    msgstr "Speichere _Datei"

If you change the accelerator key, try to make sure that the chosen key
doesn't clash with another one in the same scope. In rare cases, you might
want to discard the underscore so that no accelerator will be available for
the GUI element.


5.1 Translation Context:
========================

The GUI often uses single words or short word combinations. When
used as a frame title a colon is appended the English to disambiguate
its meaning. Another possibility to disambiguate especially short
strings is using the character '|' as separator. If the English text
contains this character, the part up to the '|' may contain a comment
for translator and/or simply declare a namespace so that the word can
be translated in a certain meaning even if the same word is used with
different meanings in other places. For example:

    msgid "Bitzi File Judgment|Complete"
    msgstr "Komplett"

In the translated string discard everything up to the first '|' and
translate the rest only.

If you want to see the strings translated every so often in gtk-gnutella
when it is running, without having to install as root each time, do

    $ ./Configure -Oders -Dlocale=$HOME/gtkg/locale
    $ make install


6. Convert the output to UTF-8 (if it's not already UTF-8 encoded):
===================================================================

iconv -f CHARSET -t UTF-8 messages.po > utf8.po

Replace CHARSET by the one you use e.g., if your from Western Europe
it's probably ISO-8859-1. Otherwise see what echo $LC_CTYPE says,
and strip the part up to the . (dot). For example:

    $ echo $LC_CTYPE
    ja_JP.eucJP
    $ iconv -f eucJP -t UTF-8 messages.po > utf8.po

If you use Vim you can also convert lines on the fly like this:

    :,!iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8

This usually works even if your terminal doesn't support UTF-8
encoded character sets.

7. Install the PO file:
=======================

First, verify that your PO file is correct:

    $ msgfmt --check --strict utf8.po -o output.mo

Second, check your PO file has any missing accelerator keys:

    $ msgfmt --check-accelerators=_ utf8.po -o output.mo

You should get no warnings but find a file ``output.mo'' which is
binary version of the ``utf8.po'' which will be installed by the
application during its installation.
 
Copy utf8.po with the appropriate name into the po directory:

The part before ``.po'' is simply the country code (ISO 3166). For
example, if you are from the Netherlands:

    $ cp utf8.po ../po/nl.po


8. Stay tuned!
==============

The messages may be changed from release to release and with growing
functionality there will be more messages that should be translated.
Thus, translation isn't something static. Every few months there will
be a few more sentences to be translated.

To update the PO files to reflect any changes to translatable strings
in the source files simply update your files from CVS and run

    $ cd po
    $ make update-po

This will scan the source files for translatable strings, will (re-)build
the file "gtk-gnutella.pot" and will use msgmerge to update the PO files
from the POT file.

After that you can check your language's PO file for missing/fuzzy
translations and add/correct them with you favorite editor.

When you're finished, you should run "make update-po" again. This will wrap
your .po file's lines properly to have a maximum line width of 80 characters.


9. Add localized keys to gtk-gnutella.desktop:
==============================================

The Name, GenericName, and Comment keys should be translated. The
format is:

Key[locale]=localestring

For example:

Name[nl]=gtk-gnutella

Make sure the file stays UTF-8 encoded.


10. APPENDIX
============

The complete GNU gettext manual:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/index.html

A good online English<->German dictionary:
http://dict.leo.org/

Standard country codes (ISO 3166):
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso3166.txt

Standard language codes (ISO 639):
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm

Freedesktop.org desktop entry spec:
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-entry-spec/

