General material on the subject can be found in the Info pages for the gettext package. In KDE practice, the handling of POTs and POs looks like this:
If there's no translation for a given program (i.e. there are no PO files with the same name in the appropriate folder "kde-i18n/$LANG/messages/(package-name)/") -- and only if this is the case! -- then a POT file is loaded into an ASCII editor and saved with the "PO" ending in the folder where it was missing. This results in a file with the a name like "kde-i18n/$LANG/messages/(package-name)/(program-name).po".
From now on you do all your work for the given program with the PO file. Most of the work consists of updating, improving, and unifying already-completed translations (i.e. POs which are already there).
After you've filled out (or updated) the header (who, when, etc. as well as deleting the "fuzzy" tag, see below) you fill in the empty strings with new translations, and check the "fuzzy" translations and correct them if necessary. (Incidentally: it's almost always necessary.)
So, for example starting with:
#: kedit.cpp:90 kedit.cpp:1071 msgid "Show &Status Bar" msgstr "" |
you would translate it to the following (assuming you were translating it to German):
#: kedit.cpp:90 kedit.cpp:1071 msgid "Show &Status Bar" msgstr "&Statusleiste anzeigen" |
And from the incorrect:
#: ReniceDlg.cpp:31 #, fuzzy msgid "Renice Process" msgstr "Laufende Prozesse" |
...you would go to the correct translation:
#: ReniceDlg.cpp:31 msgid "Renice Process" msgstr "Neue Prozesspriorität" |
Then there's a subtle error which occurs especially often in the transition from KDE 1.x to KDE "next generation":
#: kpackage.cpp:613 #, fuzzy, c-format msgid "Unknown package type: %1" msgstr "Unbekannter Pakettyp: %s" |
(The translation is correct but the string of the variable has an obsolete format.)
has to be changed to: #: kpackage.cpp:613 c-format msgid "Unknown package type: %1" msgstr "Unbekannter Pakettyp: %1" |
After the corrections have been done you need to delete the "fuzzy" tag. Otherwise, the corrected string will just be ignored during compilation.
Finally there might be lines at the end of the file beginning with "#~" like this:
#~ msgid "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
#~ msgstr "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
#~ msgid "No comment available"
#~ msgstr "Keine Erklärung verfügbar" |
These lines have been commented out, usually because they are no longer used by the program and should be deleted from time to time in the interest of disk space, bandwidth, and your and future translators' sanity :-)
For any other questions on this topic you are once more advised to look at the Info pages for the GNU gettext package (see the KDE online help).