4.8 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 before⁷. 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 with 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://projects.gnome.org/gtranslator/.
• Lokalize—the KDE 4 editor. See http://userbase.kde.org/Lokalize.
• KBabel—the KDE 3 editor. No longer supported, but might be available on some old systems.
• 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=2530.
• Various web-based editors.

4.8.1 Web-based Systems

An alternative way to maintain translations is to use one of the existing online editors. There are plans to install a web-based system for managing .po files at Savannah, including online editing and statistics. Until it happens, teams who wish to use this functionality may setup such a server on a host of their own, or use one of the existing free hosting platforms such as Launchpad (http://translations.launchpad.net).

Here is a short and probably incomplete list of such systems:

• Pootle—http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle
• Vertaal—http://code.google.com/p/vertaal
• Narro—http://code.google.com/p/narro
• Launchpad—https://dev.launchpad.net

If you decide to use such a system, please make sure that no translations are published in HTML format there.

Note that to keep the .pot files regularly updated (assuming such a web-based system runs msgmerge automatically), you’ll have to take care of the one-way regular sync from the ‘www’ CVS repository.