Translation information

If you're interested in helping with providing translation for Inkscape, here are a few links to help you getting started:

   http://www.gtkmm.org/gtkmm2/docs/tutorial/html/ch20s03.html
   http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/l10n-guide/
   http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/style-guides/
   http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html

If you're interested in providing translations, download the .po file for your language from here:

   http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/inkscape/inkscape/po/

If a .po file for your language does not already exist, then create one by copying the inkscape.pot file that gets generated when you run make in the codebase.

Edit the file to add or correct translations of the English strings, and then upload your work via the SourceForge patch tracker:

   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=93438&atid=604308

(Check the Upload checkbox and add your file or patch.)

Here's how to make an absolutely up-to-date translation (in case the PO file in CVS is not up-to-date enough):

1. update your local copy of Inkscape in the usual way: "cvs update"
2. "./autogen.sh"
3. "./configure"
4. enter the "po" directory: "cd po"
5. generate the current PO template: "../intltool-update --pot"
6. merge your existing translations into the new POT file (.pot):
   "msgmerge your_latest_PO_file .pot > new_PO_file"

Then you just need to complete the translations in the PO file that was created in step 6.

Tools for Translations

• emacs' po-mode (contained in the gettext distribution; the version in po-utils is old)
• kbabel (http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/)
• gtranslator (http://gtranslator.sourceforge.net/)
• GRand Unified Translation (http://www.kvdb.net/projects/grut/)

A few important things to remember

• After translating a fuzzy string (one that is marked with a ", fuzzy" comment), please remove its "fuzzy" tag -- otherwise this translation will be discarded by the build process, meaning that this string will show up untranslated. KBabel can do this automatically (see KBabel settings).
• Before publishing your work (after you have finished updating the PO file), please update the "PO-Revision-Date" and "Last-Translator" fields in the PO file header. KBabel can do this automatically.

Locale Testing

Before reporting that a locale doesn't work in Inkscape, you need to make sure that your system has that locale correctly set up. To do this, you need to generally find a way to run "locale-gen". (Under Debian this is via "dpkg-reconfigure locale".) If you set the LANG variable and check a regular tool, you should see the correct language for both the libc error (first line) and the tool error (second line):

LANG=es_MX ls -z
ls: opción inválida -- z
Pruebe `ls --help' para más información.

If it reports the regular C messages, your locale has not been correctly configured, and you'll need to find the right way to run "locale-gen" for your distribution:

LANG=es_ES ls -z
ls: invalid option -- z
Try `ls --help' for more information.