Guides/Translating Bongo

Translating Bongo is easy. All that is required is a good understanding of both English and the language you wish to translate Bongo into. Just follow these easy steps:

You will need the ISO code for the language you will be translating into. For example, French is fr, German is de, Italian is it, Portuguese is pt, etc.

• Checkout from Subversion:

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/bongo/trunk/ bongo-trunk

• Configure Bongo. This will mean prerequisites will be required otherwise the configuration step will fail. One can find prerequisites on the Installation/Source page.

cd bongo-trunk/
./autogen.sh

• Update the pot file:

cd po/
make update-po

• Create a new po file based on language you will be translating into. In this example I'll use German:

cp bongo.pot de.po

• Edit the header of your new file as shown below. My additions for German are shown in red:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) 2007 Bongo
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# Hans Gerhard <translator@example.com>, 2007.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: de\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: bongo-devel@gna.org\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2007-06-28 18:34+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2007-06-28 17:45+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Hans Gerhard <translator@example.com>\n"
"Language-Team: german\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms:  nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

You should add the last line about Plural-Forms if it is missing.

• The other lines are the messages to translate from English. An example is shown below with my additions in red:

msgid "Hello World!"
msgstr "Hallo Welt!"

• Save your changes and email the file as an attachment to bongo-devel@gna.org.

[edit] Other tips for translating

[edit] Using plurals

Plurals are often used so strings such as "You have won %s point(s)!". Originally the po file will look like this:

msgid "You have won one point!"
msgid_plural "You have won %d points!"
msgstr[0] ""

After translating into German, this is how it would look. My additions are in red again:

msgid "You have won one point!"
msgid_plural "You have won %d points!"
msgstr[0] "Sie haben einen Punkt gewonnen!"
msgstr[1] "Sie haben %d Punkte gewonnen!"

If a singular string is required, msgstr[0] will be used. If a plural string is required, msgstr[1] will be used.

[edit] Current status of translations