[Alexandria-i18n-list] How to translate Alexandria

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 23:23 +0100, Chaves wrote:
> Hi, I'm Adrián Chaves Fernández and I want to tanslate Alexandria into
> Galician. What do I have to do?

Hi Adrián,

I'm Cathal Mc Ginley, one of the administrators of Alexandria - and I
sort of co-ordinate the translation team, although I'm pretty new to the
whole process. (I am also trying to work on my first Irish (ga)
translation for Alexandria.) Thanks for offering to help.

In common with most internationalized free software, Alexandria uses
'gettext' for localization. Most GNU/Linux distributions will have the
GNU gettext package already installed. The gettext manual gives an
excellent introduction to this system:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/

The short version is, translators only have to translate the
user-visible strings; these are gathered together in a single PO file.

The PO file for Galician will be called gl.po - we start with a blank
'PO Template' called alexandria.pot (generated from the latest program
sources). Grab the current version here:
http://www.gnostai.org/tmp/alexandria-0.6.2/alexandria.pot
You can just rename it to gl.po and start working on it.

There are a couple of programs available to help you work with the PO
file:
        * If you use GNU Emacs, there is po-mode (optionally installed
        as part of GNU gettext-tools). This is what I use.
        
        * For GNOME, there is Gtranslator which seems quite easy to use.
        
        * For KDE, KBabel is the commonly used program.
        
Then, for each msgid you enter a translated msgstr. You save the
modified PO file, and test it with a development version of Alexandria.
(I might write more about that later). What I do, from the SVN checkout
of alexandria, is:
        sudo rake install
        LANG=ga_IE alexandria

In any case, you can do a lot of translation even before setting up your
test environment. When your translation is done (or partially done) send
the PO file to me (not this list) and I'll integrate it.

Translating comptuter-style phrases can be a real pain: the sort of
technical language and very terse style can be very hard to deal with in
non-English languages. (I find this particularly problematic in Irish.)
You might look at other free software which is already translated into
your language, that might give you an idea of how some common
terminology is used. (In the future, I hope we can change the language
of the user-interface to make it easier to translate.)

Welcome to Alexandria,

   -   Cathal.
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