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Translators Guide

docs/contributing/translators-guide.md

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wxWidgets translator guide

This note is addressed to wxWidgets translators.

First of all, here is what you will need:

  1. GNU gettext package

    • For Unix systems you can download gettext-0.xx.yy.tar.gz from any GNU mirror (RPMs and DEBs are also available from the usual places)
    • For Windows you can download the precompiled binaries from www.wxwidgets.org or install Poedit and add <installdir>/poEdit/bin to your path (so it can find xgettext).

  2. A way to run a program recursively on an entire directory from the command line:

    • For Unix systems, this is done in locale/Makefile using the standard find command and xargs which is installed on almost all modern Unices.
    • For Win32 systems you can use Cygwin, MSYS or WSL.

  3. Access to the git repository is not necessary strictly speaking, but will make things a lot easier for you and others.

Now a brief overview of the process of translations (please refer to GNU gettext documentation for more details). It happens in several steps:

  1. the strings to translate are extracted from the C++ sources using xgettext program into a wxstd.pot file which is a "text message catalog"

  2. this new wxstd.pot file (which is updated from time to time by running make wxstd.pot in the locale subdirectory) is merged with existing translations in another .po file (for example, de.po) and replaces this file (this is done using the program msgmerge)

  3. the resulting .po file must be translated

  4. finally, msgformat must be run to produce a .mo file: "binary message catalog"

How does it happen in practice? There is a Makefile in the "locale" directory which will do almost everything (except translations) for you. i.e. just type make lang.po to create or update the message catalog for 'lang'. Then edit the resulting lang.po and make sure that there are no empty or fuzzy translations left (empty translations are the ones with msgstr "", fuzzy translations are those which have the word "fuzzy" in a comment just above them). Then type make lang.mo which will create the binary message catalog.

Under Windows (If you don't have Cygwin or MinGW), you should execute the commands manually, please have a look at Makefile to see what must be done.