2.3 Working with PO Files

We anticipate that some gnu.org translators will find this format odd or inconvenient, if they never happened to work with PO files before. Don't worry, you will soon get accustomed to it. It is the established format for translations in the Free World, and you should have no problems if you have translated software before.

The most efficient way to edit a PO file is using a specialized PO editor, because each of them represents and treats gettext messages in a consistent and predictable way. It is possible to edit a PO file with an ordinary plain text editor, but extra effort would be necessary to make it valid. Here is a list of widely used PO editors:

• PO mode. We recommend using GNU Emacs in PO mode, because Emacs is the program that is suitable for performing any task when it comes to maintaining the GNU Project's website. Provided that you have GNU gettext installed, any .po file you visit should automatically switch to PO mode. You can enable/disable it by M-x po-mode <RET>. On some GNU/Linux distros such as gNewSense, PO mode is available in a separate package, gettext-el. See http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext.
• gTranslator—the GNOME PO editor. See http://gtranslator.sourceforge.net.
• Lokalize—the KDE 4 editor. See http://userbase.kde.org/Lokalize.
• KBabel—the KDE 3 editor. See http://kbabel.kde.org.
• Poedit—another popular editor that is based on the wxWidgets graphical toolkit. See http://www.poedit.net.
• Virtaal—a relevantly new editor that supports also the XLIFF format and uses the Translate Toolkit API. See http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal.
• po.vim—ftplugin for the Vim editor. The best option for people who use Vim as their editor. See http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=695.
• Various web-based editors. See Savannah VCS.

• New Translation: How to start a new translation.
• Migrating: How to migrate an existing translation to a PO format under GNUN's control.
• GNU News: How to handle ``whatsnew'' (a.k.a. ``gnunews'').
• PO Tips: Tips and hints for translators.
• generic.LANG.html: Specifying information that will propagate in every translation in a certain language.
• PO Files and Team: How to maintain translations in the team's repository.