This wiki page is intended for new translators, and should be read the first time from top to bottom.
Checking out the translations is the main part. It consists of downloading the pot file (base template) and the po files (translations). But before going that far, you can have a first idea of what needs to be translated by consulting the stats page at http://i18n.xfce.org/stats. If you don’t find your language there, you can start to check out the daily pot snapshot.
The pot snapshot is special, it contains only .pot files, so it is fast to download, and contains the whole projects that can be translated. But after the translations are committed it is good to checkout with SVN, or daily svn-snapshots if you really can’t use SVN from where you translate. Download the pot snapshot at http://foo-projects.org/~pollux/i18n/.
Checking out the po files with SVN is easy, have a look at the SVN howto.
Is your language already translated or being translated by someone else, then you should try to work together with the current translator of that language, and split up the work so you are reducing the workload, and increasing the quality of the translation. Many translators are happy to share the work or even appreciate people discussing translations.
The header of the po file contains the field “Last-Translator:”. As example here is the French translation of xfce4-panel: xfce4-panel/trunk/po/fr.po.
If the last translator doesn’t respond in the on-coming one or two weeks to your mails, concider that you can go ahead and translate.
Sometimes people are already working on translations for your language, but they haven’t submitted or committed their translations. It helps to announce that you are working on something before you are actually doing it, and more people might help you out and reduce the workload.
You should consider subscribing to the i18n mailing list and tell your intentions there.
Simple part of the game, edit the po file, e.g. xx.po where xx is the language code. You can look for the list of softwares to use for translations.
If there is no translation for your language yet, run the command “msginit” from within the directory of the po files. It will generate a .po file based on the .pot file. If your locale is not in UTF-8, use a tool like iconv to convert it, e.g.:
$ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 nl.po > nl.po.utf8 $ sed 's/ISO-8859-1/UTF-8/' < nl.po.utf8 > nl.po $ rm nl.po.utf8
Here you are now, at the last part. Follow the next instructions to put your translations upstream.
svn add” over the new filessvn diff > name.diff” and “gzip name.diff”tar czf archive-name.tar.gz pot-snapshot/”