How to translate a Drupal site using .po (Portable Object) files

[By Thiago Bennicchio]

Hi friends,
please read the whole email before starting the work.

Now we have offline text files to translate the interface. I'm sending Judith the Portuguese file. Mathias, Leo, please tell me in which languages are you going to translate so I can send you the proper files (please reply to all so we know who's doing what).

As we talked before, we need to be very careful when dealing with this files (not to erase commas, quotes and #).

The basic structure of the files is the following:

: modules/nonon nonno ononon

msgid "nonon nonon nonon onono"
msgstr "non nono nonononon onono"

where "msgid" is the orginial expression in english and "msgstr" is the translated version.

So you'll only change the msgstr expression (be carefull not to erase the quotes).

Hints:

1) I suggest you do this work in a plain text like Notepad ++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm). Using this software, if you select any language in "Languages" menu, you can view the lines in different coloros. "Languages" menu are for software programming, but it also makes it easy to view the .po files.

2) Don't mind translating the whole content, focus on the main expressions and menus (the ones you already saw present on the website or the ones you think is related to user interface). We've tried to clean at maximum this files, leaving only the strings that're being used on the interface, but some trash

3) some text strings brings symbols like % or ! followed by words like "name" (as !name). There's also HTML tags (like "<a href"). Those are interface variables and shouldn't be translated or changed.

any doubt, please ask here or via skype,

Thiago

[See also locale_subset]

Resolution