[latina] How to start a translation

[Thomas Thurman <tthurman gnome org>]

Here is how to start a translation.

The translations for GNOME are held in ".po" files, Portable Object 
files.  You can see a list of all the current ones at

http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/la/gnome-2-24

Choose a module that you want to translate.  The right column is the 
programs themselves, so it's probably best to start there, and with 
"GNOME desktop".  Click any of the little green arrows next to a module 
name to see the .po file.  Save it to disk and edit it in a text editor
such as gedit.

The system is quite simple:

msgstr "Desktop"
msgid "tabula"

means that the string "Desktop" translates to "tabula".  Leave things 
like "#, c-format" alone, and make sure that %d (which means a number) 
and %s (which means a string) appear the same number of times in the 
msgid as the msgstr.

It's probably best if you tell this list which ones you're working on so 
we don't have any duplication of effort.

When you've done some, not necessarily all, of one, email it to me and 
I'll check it in.  In the long run, people who check a lot of stuff in 
can get svn accounts of their own, but for the medium term this is fine.

Rafael: I've started committing what you've written on the wiki about 
the menu texts, so you don't need to add that.

Does this make sense?  Please tell me if anyone runs into any problems.

Thomas

-- 
Thomas Thurman, tthurman at gnome, http://blogs.gnome.org/tthurman
(releasing the little bird)