How to translate SquirrelMail into another language?
====================================================
This document does not deal with CVS and how to upload translations to
the repository.
1. First time translation
-------------------------
a) You must have gettext installed. If it is not installed you can
download the soources from
.
b) Find the language code for the language you are going to translate
into. A list of language codes can be found at
. If
there is a 2 letter code for the language, use this.
Create a directory squirrelmail/locale/language_code/LC_MESSAGES/.
Copy squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail.po into this directory. This is the
file that is going to be translated.
c) To translate the actual strings fill inn the msgstr after each
msgid with the appropiate translation. There are a few tools which
kan make this job a bit easier at
.
Convert the translated squirrelmail.po into a binary file by
running the command "msgfmt -o squirrelmail.mo squirrelmail.po" in
the directory where the translated squirrelmail.po is residing.
d) Add the language name and language code to the array at the top of
squirrelmail/functions/i18n.php.
There is also a small script in the po/ directory that can help in
creating charset mappings from the mappings files that are provided by
the Unicode consortium.
2. Maintaining translations
---------------------------
the text strings in the program will change over time. This means that
strings that are already translated is no longer used and new strings
are added. Therefore it is neccessary to maintain the translations.
a) There should always be an updated template containing all strings
in SquirrelMail in squirrelmail/squirrelmail.po. To merge all new
strings in this file into an existing translation run the command
msgmerge squirrelmail/locale/language/LC_MESSAGES/squirrelmail.po \
squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail.po > \
squirrelmail/locale/language/LC_MESSAGES/squirrelmail.po.new
This should keep all strings that are unchanged and comment out all
strings that are no longer in use. You might want to make a copy
before doing this.
b) Rung msgfmt again to create a new binary file.
3. Updating the template
------------------------
This script comes from Serek:
#!/bin/bash
xgettext --keyword=_ -keyword=N_ \
--default-domain=squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail \
-C squirrelmail/src/*.php
xgettext --keyword=_ -keyword=N_ \
--default-domain=squirrelmail/po/squirrelmail \
-C -j squirrelmail/functions/*.php