When starting a new translation, the translator creates a file called `LANG.po´, as a copy of the `package.pot´ template file with modifications in the initial comments (at the beginning of the file) and in the header entry (the first entry, near the beginning of the file).
The easiest way to do so is by use of the `msginit´ program. For example:
$ cd PACKAGE-VERSION $ cd po $ msginit
The alternative way is to do the copy and modifications by hand. To do so, the translator copies `package.pot´ to `LANG.po´. Then she modifies the initial comments and the header entry of this file.
msginit
Programmsginit [option]
The msginit
program creates a new
PO file, initializing the meta information with values from the
user's environment.
If no inputfile is given, the current directory is searched for the POT file. If it is `-´, standard input is read.
If no output file is given, it depends on the `--locale´ option or the user's locale setting. If it is `-´, the results are written to standard output.
.properties
syntax, not in PO file
syntax..properties
syntax. Note that this file format doesn't
support plural forms and silently drops obsolete messages.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.
xgettext
. It
contains an email address or URL where you can report bugs in the
untranslated strings:
xgettext
.msgmerge
and msgfmt
programs, as well as
for users whose locale's character encoding differs from yours (see
section 10.2.4 How to specify the
output character set gettext
uses). 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-8859-14
,
ISO-8859-15
, KOI8-R
, KOI8-U
,
KOI8-T
, 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
,
GEORGIAN-PS
, UTF-8
. In the GNU system, the following encodings are
frequently used for the corresponding languages.
ISO-8859-1
for Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque,
Breton, Catalan, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian,
Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic,
Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Malay, Manx, Norwegian, Occitan,
Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Uzbek, Walloon,ISO-8859-2
for Bosnian, 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, Maori,ISO-8859-14
for Welsh,ISO-8859-15
for Basque, Catalan, Dutch, English,
Finnish, French, Galician, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese,
Spanish, Swedish, Walloon,KOI8-R
for Russian,KOI8-U
for Ukrainian,KOI8-T
for Tajik,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,GEORGIAN-PS
for Georgian,UTF-8
for any language, including those listed
above.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.8bit
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