There are several packages to assist you with practical GUI translation. Basically, they assist you with searching fuzzy or untranslated strings and present you possible or comparable translations. Apart from that, they have a lot of other useful features. Just check them out. The main candidates are:
Developed and maintained by Andrea Rizzi. As of version 0.5 with the following capabilities, according to its author:
Search for translated strings in GMO files (i.e. compiled PO files) for comparisons and consistency checks
Auto scroll to untranslated or fuzzy messages
CVS manager for PO(T) files with file statistics (you'll need a CVS/kde-i18n copy on your hard disk for this one)
Automatic header updates
Search in $LANG.messages files to assist with consistency checks
It is running under KDE 1 only (yet). You can get it from the kdesdk package or from its homepage.
Developed and maintained by Matthias Kiefer. As of version 0.1 its status can be described as follows:
Simple to use PO editor in early development stage: basic editing functionality as well as full navigation, for example going to next fuzzy or untranslated string, are already available
Will be enhanced to for fast and consistent translations, including a catalog manager similar to the one in Ktranslator, providing all important statistical data in PO files
KBabel is running under KDE 2 already. You can get it from its homepage at www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~Matthias.Kiefer/kbabel/
For ways to set this PO mode up with GNU Emacs, see the comments in the file po-mode.el that comes with the GNU gettext package. It also works with XEmacs if you set it up like this:
Copy po-mode.el (not the compiled .elc file) from the gettext package to a directory that's visible to XEmacs (e.g. /usr/X11R6/lib/xemacs/site-lisp/);
enter the following entry at the beginning of the .xemacs-options file in your home directory: (autoload 'po-mode "po-mode")
and make the following new entry to Options -> Customize -> Variable -> auto-mode-alist: "\\.po[tx]?\\'\\|\\.po\\." (with the quotes) in the upper line and po-mode in the lower line (without any quotes).
The functionality is about as follows:
All important navigation features (go to next fuzzy, untranslated etc.)
Automatic insertion of (some) header data
Validation (checking if everything is formatted okay)
Lots of useful shortcuts for navigation, removing fuzzies etc.
Searching auxiliary-files for translations of a given string into other languages
Looking up strings in the sources
As always with Emacs, the handling needs some getting used to. (For instance, the buffer with the original text is kind of read-only and you have always to open a new buffer where you can work on your translation.) But for people who are used to Emacs or are willing to learn its ways, this mode can be a big help. Another factor might be that Emacs is apparently still one of the best ways to edit DocBook SGML, which is also the format of KDE documentation. A very good introduction on working with Emacs in general and on working with the SGML module in particular can be found as an Acrobat PDF file at www.snee.com/bob/sgmlfree/index.html
(Most info in this section thanks to Matthias Kiefer.)