Translator's Guide

From gPodderWiki

This guide quickly describes how to translate gPodder into your language. Applications and files you will need

• A recent copy of the following files from the gPodder source: messages.pot, gpodder.desktop (see Running gPodder from Git on how to get these files)
• A translations editor, e.g. poedit (recommended), KBabel or gtranslator

Contents 1 Before you start 2 Step-by-step guide 3 Testing your translation 3.1 Testing translations with different system language

[edit] Before you start

Before you start translating gPodder into your language, please check if it has not already been translated into that language. You will find a list of current translation files by following this link:

http://repo.or.cz/w/gpodder.git?a=tree;f=data/po;hb=HEAD

Please note that if a translation file is there already, this doesn't mean we don't need your help! Some of these translations are incomplete, so please download the files and open them in your PO Editor and make sure we have 100% translated strings for your language. Thanks!

[edit] Step-by-step guide

1. Copy messages.pot to XX.po, where "XX" is the ISO 639-1 language code for your translation
2. Open the XX.po file in your translation editor, e.g. poedit
3. Translate all strings
4. Edit gpodder.desktop in your favourite text editor
5. In gpodder.desktop, translate the Name, GenericName and Comment fields
6. Send the resulting files (XX.po and gpodder.desktop) to our Mailing List where it can be reviewed and included in gPodder

[edit] Testing your translation

If the language you translate for is the language set in your system/session, all you need to do in your Git checkout is run "make messages" in your source folder (which will compile the translations to be usable by gettext), followed by "make test", which will run gPodder from the source checkout folder.

[edit] Testing translations with different system language

Thanks to Silvio Sisto for the initial idea of testing the language this way and for asking on the Mailing List.

Problem: You have your system running in, say, English and want to test your translation into, say, Spanish.

Solution:

• Check if the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales already generates the files for es_ES.UTF-8 (or similiar). If it does, you can skip the next step.
• If es_ES.UTF-8 has not been generated, install Spanish language support via sudo aptitude install language-support-es. This will install the whole language support for Spanish for all apps
• In your Git checkout, now run:

make messages
export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
make test

• Because you have entered export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 in an interactive shell, the rest of the system will not be affected, and closing down that session will also forget the language setting for this session.
• If you don't need the Spanish translation files anymore, and because you have installed with aptitude, it will remove the dependencies when uninstalled: sudo aptitude remove language-support-es. This frees up the space taken by langugage-support-es + its dependencies (as of writing this guide, that's 66MB)