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4.1 Starting a New Translation

To start a new translation, the most simple way is to copy the existing POT as article.lang.po, where lang is your language code. The name of the POT is article.pot or, when you are translating an optional template, article.pot.opt (see optional-templates). All these files are situated in the po/ subdirectory of the directory containing the HTML file of the article. See Files and Directories, for more info on GNUN directory layout. For example, to prepare for a new translation of the essay https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html in Manx, you can simply cd philosophy/po; cp free-sw.pot free-sw.gv.po and then edit the latter. If free-sw.pot does not exist it is because either the article is not yet “templated” (i.e. migrated to the new style), or the GNUN maintainers have not yet added it to the value of the appropriate variable in server/gnun/gnun.mk. In that case, just ask them to do what’s needed for the POT to be generated.

You could also use the msginit utility that would populate the PO file header with the right information, provided your environment is set up correctly. See msginit Invocation in GNU gettext tools.

GNUN also provides a customized script to automatically fill more header fields. See The gnun-init-po Script.