GNU Info
(gettext.info)Creating
Creating a New PO File
**********************
When starting a new translation, the translator copies the
`PACKAGE.pot' template file to a file called `LANG.po'. Then she
modifies the initial comments and the header entry of this file.
The initial comments "SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE", "YEAR" and "FIRST
AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR" ought to be replaced by sensible
information. This can be done in any text editor; if Emacs is used and
it switched to PO mode automatically (because it has recognized the
file's suffix), you can disable it by typing `M-x fundamental-mode'.
Modifying the header entry can already be done using PO mode: in
Emacs, type `M-x po-mode RET' and then `RET' again to start editing the
entry. You should fill in the following fields.
Project-Id-Version
This is the name and version of the package.
POT-Creation-Date
This has already been filled in by `xgettext'.
PO-Revision-Date
You don't need to fill this in. It will be filled by the Emacs PO
mode when you save the file.
Last-Translator
Fill in your name and email address (without double quotes).
Language-Team
Fill in the English name of the language, and the email address of
the language team you are part of.
Before starting a translation, it is a good idea to get in touch
with your translation team, not only to make sure you don't do
duplicated work, but also to coordinate difficult linguistic
issues.
In the Free Translation Project, each translation team has its own
mailing list. The up-to-date list of teams can be found at the
Free Translation Project's homepage,
`http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/', in the "National
teams" area.
Content-Type
Replace `CHARSET' with the character encoding used for your
language, in your locale, or UTF-8. This field is needed for
correct operation of the `msgmerge' and `msgfmt' programs, as well
as for users whose locale's character encoding differs from yours
(see Note: Charset conversion).
You get the character encoding of your locale by running the shell
command `locale charmap'. If the result is `C' or
`ANSI_X3.4-1968', which is equivalent to `ASCII' (= `US-ASCII'),
it means that your locale is not correctly configured. In this
case, ask your translation team which charset to use. `ASCII' is
not usable for any language except Latin.
Because the PO files must be portable to operating systems with
less advanced internationalization facilities, the character
encodings that can be used are limited to those supported by both
GNU `libc' and GNU `libiconv'. These are: `ASCII', `ISO-8859-1',
`ISO-8859-2', `ISO-8859-3', `ISO-8859-4', `ISO-8859-5',
`ISO-8859-6', `ISO-8859-7', `ISO-8859-8', `ISO-8859-9',
`ISO-8859-13', `ISO-8859-15', `KOI8-R', `KOI8-U', `CP850',
`CP866', `CP874', `CP932', `CP949', `CP950', `CP1250', `CP1251',
`CP1252', `CP1253', `CP1254', `CP1255', `CP1256', `CP1257',
`GB2312', `EUC-JP', `EUC-KR', `EUC-TW', `BIG5', `BIG5-HKSCS',
`GBK', `GB18030', `SHIFT_JIS', `JOHAB', `TIS-620', `VISCII',
`UTF-8'.
In the GNU system, the following encodings are frequently used for
the corresponding languages.
* `ISO-8859-1' for Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Catalan,
Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French,
Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish,
Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish,
* `ISO-8859-2' for Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish,
Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian,
* `ISO-8859-3' for Maltese,
* `ISO-8859-5' for Macedonian, Serbian,
* `ISO-8859-6' for Arabic,
* `ISO-8859-7' for Greek,
* `ISO-8859-8' for Hebrew,
* `ISO-8859-9' for Turkish,
* `ISO-8859-13' for Latvian, Lithuanian,
* `ISO-8859-15' for Basque, Catalan, Dutch, English, Finnish,
French, Galician, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese,
Spanish, Swedish,
* `KOI8-R' for Russian,
* `KOI8-U' for Ukrainian,
* `CP1251' for Bulgarian, Byelorussian,
* `GB2312', `GBK', `GB18030' for simplified writing of Chinese,
* `BIG5', `BIG5-HKSCS' for traditional writing of Chinese,
* `EUC-JP' for Japanese,
* `EUC-KR' for Korean,
* `TIS-620' for Thai,
* `UTF-8' for any language, including those listed above.
When single quote characters or double quote characters are used in
translations for your language, and your locale's encoding is one
of the ISO-8859-* charsets, it is best if you create your PO files
in UTF-8 encoding, instead of your locale's encoding. This is
because in UTF-8 the real quote characters can be represented
(single quote characters: U+2018, U+2019, double quote characters:
U+201C, U+201D), whereas none of ISO-8859-* charsets has them all.
Users in UTF-8 locales will see the real quote characters,
whereas users in ISO-8859-* locales will see the vertical
apostrophe and the vertical double quote instead (because that's
what the character set conversion will transliterate them to).
To enter such quote characters under X11, you can change your
keyboard mapping using the `xmodmap' program. The X11 names of
the quote characters are "leftsinglequotemark",
"rightsinglequotemark", "leftdoublequotemark",
"rightdoublequotemark", "singlelowquotemark", "doublelowquotemark".
Note that only recent versions of GNU Emacs support the UTF-8
encoding: Emacs 20 with Mule-UCS, and Emacs 21. As of January
2001, XEmacs doesn't support the UTF-8 encoding.
The character encoding name can be written in either upper or
lower case. Usually upper case is preferred.
Content-Transfer-Encoding
Set this to `8bit'.
Plural-Forms
This field is optional. It is only needed if the PO file has
plural forms. You can find them by searching for the
`msgid_plural' keyword. The format of the plural forms field is
described in Note: Plural forms.
automatically generated by info2www version 1.2.2.9