Translators documentation

Below are basic instructions for adding and maintaining Gettext translations for Diffuse. The installer will discover .po files in this directory and compile them into the corresponding .mo files.

The example commands below show how to create and manage the Japanese translations. Replace all instances of “ja” with the code for the desired language.

Create PO template

To create or update the PO template (po/diffuse.pot), use this command at the repo root:

xgettext -w 84 -o po/diffuse.pot -f po/POTFILES

Note: why 84 characters, you ask? because the usage text has to be 80-char wide, plus the beginning and ending " and the final \n (which is two characters).

Create a new translation

To create a new translation file, you’ll need a PO template. If not already created, refer to previous section “Create PO template”.

  1. Create a .po file for the translation (replace <lang> with your language):

    msginit -w 84 -l <lang> -o <lang>.po -i diffuse.pot

  2. Manually complete in the translations in the .po file using either an application for that such as Gtranslator or directly with a text editor such as gedit or vim.

Update a translation

Use update-translations.py to update one or more PO files.

Here is an example with the Japanese and Korean translations, respectively ja.po and ko.po:

Command-line:

./update-translations.py ja.po ko.po

This command also validate the files, so if you see a message saying “N untranslated messages”, use the text editor of your choice to complete the translations.

Validate a translation

Use update-translations.py to validate one or more PO files.

Here is an example with ja.po and ko.po:

Command-line:

./update-translations.py --check-only ja.po ko.po

Windows-specific files

Installer

Localized text for the Microsoft Windows installer is stored in separate ISL files. Copy the English version and replace the text to the right of each equal sign.

DocBook

Diffuse’s help documentation is written in the DocBook format and can be easily converted into other formats using XSLT stylesheets. If the local help documentation or its browser are unavailable, Diffuse will attempt to display the on-line help documentation using a web browser.

Start a new translation of the manual by copying the English version of the DocBook manual and then edit the contents.

The DocBook manual is converted to HTML for Windows and Unix man pages for POSIX platforms. The conversion tools insert some English text that gets localized using search and replace. Manually add new search and replace rules to these files:

../windows-installer/translations.txt
../utils/translations.txt

The format of each line is: <language id>:<English text>:<localised text>