How to translate SquirrelMail into another language? ==================================================== This document does not deal with Subversion and how to upload translations to the repository. 1. First time translation ------------------------- a) You must have gettext installed. If it is not installed you can download the sources from <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gettext/>. b) Find the language code for the language you are going to translate into. A list of language codes can be found at <URL:http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langhome.html>. If there is a 2 letter code for the language, use this. Create a directory squirrelmail/locale/language_code/LC_MESSAGES/. Copy squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail.pot into this directory and rename it to squirrelmail.po. This is the file that is going to be translated. c) To translate the actual strings fill in the msgstr after each msgid with the appropriate translation. There are a few tools which can make this job a bit easier at <URL:http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/specialized-programs.html#gui-tools>. Convert the translated squirrelmail.po into a binary file by running the command "msgfmt -o squirrelmail.mo squirrelmail.po" in the directory where the translated squirrelmail.po is residing. d) Add the language name and language code to the array at the top of squirrelmail/functions/i18n.php. There is also a small script in the po/ directory that can help in creating charset mappings from the mappings files that are provided by the Unicode consortium. 2. Maintaining translations --------------------------- The text strings in the program will change over time. This means that strings that are already translated are no longer used and new strings are added. Therefore it is necessary to maintain the translations. a) There should always be an updated template containing all strings in SquirrelMail in squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail.pot. To merge all new strings in this file into an existing translation run the command msgmerge squirrelmail/locale/language/LC_MESSAGES/squirrelmail.po \ squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail.pot > \ squirrelmail/locale/language/LC_MESSAGES/squirrelmail.po.new This should keep all strings that are unchanged and comment out all strings that are no longer in use. You might want to make a copy before doing this. SquirrelMail contains po/mergepo script that can merge strings without need to write that complex msgmerge command. Just put your translation name as option. b) Run msgfmt again to create a new binary file. 3. Updating the template ------------------------ SquirrelMail provides po/xgetpo script that extracts all the required strings and updates po/squirrelmail.pot file. $Id: translating.txt 12125 2007-01-13 19:04:49Z kink $
