-*- text -*- If you are contributing code or translations to the Subversion project, please read this first. =============================== Guide to translating Subversion =============================== $LastChangedDate: 2004-07-03 11:24:57 -0400 (Sat, 03 Jul 2004) $ * Introduction * Software version requirements * Starting a new translation * Updating existing po files * Verifying your po file * Requirements for po and mo files * Conventions for the empty string msgid section * Translation teams * Single versus double quotes * Error message conventions Introduction ============ Subversion uses gettext for its translation. Gettext uses '.po' files to store translation information; the existing ones are kept in the subversion/po directory of the repository. [Note that the last paragraph deliberately does not say GNU gettext.] Please take some time to go through this document as well as the HACKING document also in this directory. Software version requirements ============================= The Makefile build targets locale-gnu-* (used to maintain po files) require GNU gettext 0.12 or newer. Note that this is not a requirement for those wanting to compile the *.po files into *.mo's. Starting a new translation ========================== Before starting a new translation please contact the subversion development mailing list to make sure you are not duplicating efforts. After that, you should perform the following steps: Unix 1) check out Subversion (see INSTALL for more information) 2) run ./autogen.sh 3) run ./configure 4) run make locale-gnu-pot This step is currently only supported for GNU gettext Makefile based systems 5) Copy the generated subversion.pot to a file named LANG.po, where LANG is the language code of your language. Steps (2) and (3) generate a Makefile; step (4) generates subversion/po/subversion.pot The header comment of the pot file contains a line like this: # FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR. Because the Subversion project has a policy not to put names in its files, please don't fill it out; delete it instead. (See HACKING for a description of this convention.) Updating existing po files ========================== The Makefile based part of the build system contains a make target to facilitate maintenance of existing po files. To update po files on systems with GNU gettext run make locale-gnu-po-update Verifying your po file ====================== Before submitting to the mailing list or committing to the repository, please make sure your po file 'compiles'. You can do this with these steps (on Makefile based systems): 1) run './autogen.sh' 2) run './configure' (with the appropriate arguments) 3) run 'make locale' The autogen.sh step is important, since it adds new po files as dependencies of the 'locale' build target. Note however that steps 1 and 2 are only needed once after you have added a new translation. Requirements for po and mo files ================================ On some gettext implementations we have to ensure that the mo files - whether obtained through the project or created locally - are encoded using UTF-8. This requirement stem from the fact that Subversion uses UTF-8 internally, some implementations translate to the active locale and the fact that bind_textdomain_codeset() is not portable across implementations. To satisfy this requirement po files are required to be UTF-8 encoded. If the gettext implementation on the target system doesn't support bind_textdomain_codeset(), the build system will ensure that the mo file is in UTF-8 by removing the Content-Type header from the po file header. Note that some msgfmt utilities dislike the absence of the charset designator and will generate warnings along the lines of "Won't be able to do character set conversion" because of it. You can safely ignore these warnings. Conventions for the empty string msgid section ============================================== Some gettext implementations use a section with a msgid "" (empty string) to keep administrative data. One of the headers suggested is the 'Last-Translator:' field. Because the Subversion project has a policy not to name contributors in specific files, but give credit in the repository log messages, you are required not to put your name in this field. Since some tools require this field to consider the po file valid (i.e. Emacs PO Mode), you can put "dev@subversion.tigris.org" into this field. Translation teams ================= The GNU translation project (http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~gnutra/po/HTML/) attempts to organise translation attempts and get translators for various packages. Some teams have guidelines to stimulate consistency across packages. Single versus double quotes =========================== The project has standardised the use of quotes. Some translation teams have done the same. If there is no translation team for your locale or they did not standardise quoting, please follow the project guidelines per HACKING. If they did: follow them :-) Error message conventions ========================= Since translators will generally see all error messages in the code, it's important to know that there is a special section in HACKING about this category of strings. Here the same applies as does for the quotes: Adhere to them on all points for which there is no explicit policy set out by the translation team for your language.