[Bug-gnubg] Translations

[Philippe Michel]

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013, Rasmus Althoff wrote:

> Bug #2: The German locale setting doesn't translate all of the menu items and 
> shortcut graphical items. Is there an ASCII file with the locale traslations? 
> The files under locales seem to bee binary content. I would like to 
> contribute a translation if I could just edit some ASCII file. Might be 
> another idea, to put the locale setting in ASCII files so that the 
> contribution is easier.

When launched, gnubg use the binary files you saw but these are generated 
from text files available here :
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gnubg/gnubg/po/

The gnubg.pot file is a template created by looking for text messages in 
source files and the <country code>.po are translations for the 
corresponding languages.

Theoretically, the .pot file sould be updated when a text message is added 
or changed, or at least periodically. It is then merged with the existing 
.po files and the translators can update the latter.

In practice, gnubg.pot was about two years old (I just recreated it after 
your post) and some .po files have not been updated for even longer.


What you should do if you want to contribute to the German translation is 
to download the de.po file from the above location and add missing entries 
or fix incorrect ones.

This can be done with any text editor but it should be easier and less 
error prone with a dedicated tool. Moreover, it should be able to create 
the binary file that you can copy in gnubg's installation directory to 
check your work. I don't know these but asking Google for "po files 
editor" gives some leads.

A thing you should be careful for strings in the GUI is their length : if 
the right translation of a 6-letters English term takes 15 in German, you 
should try to figure how it will look and possibly abbreviate it or find 
something else. For other text output like error messages or analysis 
printing, it probably doesn't matter.