Translation

The applications are directly reading po files.

What are po files? po (portable object) files are used by the gettext translation system and a lot of tools exist to edit them (e.g. poedit)

To create a new translation you should use the pot file located in data/shared in the repository.

After you've created a new po file, copy them into any of the search paths (either directly, or in a folder named po) and give it the name as specified here.

Example: Name it after the pattern ll_CC where ll is an ISO-639 two-letter language code, and CC is an ISO-3166 two-letter country code.

If you create a new translation it would be nice if you would contribute it to the project.

Developers

Translators don't have to do this

Updating the pot file

After new string were added in the code, you have to update the pot file to make those strings available to the translators.

There is a Makefile target called pot - so if you have gnu make installed, just run make pot in the root of the project. Otherwise use the tool xgettext to extract the strings from the source code.

Mark strings as being translatable

use the _ macro to mark a string as being translatable. E.g. _("my string")

For only extracting them, but not translating them, you can use N_("my string"). Now my string appears in the pot file, but the location where the string is stored, is still the english string my string - not anything translated.

By adding a context to the translators you could make things clearer, e.g. use C_("Some string that describes the translatable string", "my string") to add a msgctxt line to the pot file. And there is also a NC_ version that works like the above mentioned N_.