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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.


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