3.1. POT and PO Files

The things you actually translate in GUI translation, are ASCII files with the extension ".pot" and ".po". What follows is an overview of the important things to know about these files -- you can find the "unimportant" stuff in the info pages to the gettext package. (Seriously: those Info pages are really good and very recommendable reading.)

To provide a template for translations, the English menu and dialog texts of a program are stored in a POT file. (We'll spare you the suspense now and tell you that "POT" means "PO Template" and "PO" means "Portable Object.") To see examples how POTs and POs look like you may want to pay a visit to WebCVS , directory "kde-i18n".

From these standard templates or "POT files" translation teams produce the PO files for their respective language -- simply by loading anyfile.pot to an ASCII editor and saving it as anyfile.po to another directory. After translating the strings inside the file, these POs will contain the menu and dialog texts for a given program if users choose, for example, "German" or "Icelandic" as the standard language. To be exact, there is another intermediate step which make MOs ("Machine Objects") from the POs during compilation. But this is something which translatores don't generally need to worry about. At least, not as long as their POs are in the correct format; see below under the heading Checking Your Work.

The English POs, as well as all the original documentation can be found in the subfolders of each program package. As of the closing of the 1x branch the POT files and all translations can be found in a separate KDE folder called "kde-i18n" and represent their own package. Included are:

• the POT files in the folder "kde-i18n/templates/"

• the language-specific PO files in the folder "kde-i18n/$LANG/messages/(package-name)/", (e.g. "kde-i18n/de/messages/(package-name)/" for the German files)

• the language-specific documentation in the folder "kde-i18n/$LANG/docs/(package-name)/index.docbook"

($LANG is short for language codes like "de", "fr", "ru", etc. These abbreviations are ISO codes, BTW, and can be found at www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt).

An archive with all of the kde-i18n files can be found at ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/CVS/snapshots/current/. Of course, it contains all the material from 40 translation teams and is a bit awkward for practical work. However, the whole thing has been split up by language, so you can download the appropriate files at i18n.kde.org/po_archive. Naturally, it's also possible to get the files through CVS, CVSUP or WebCVS.