Table of Contents

  1. Testing your translations
    1. Windows
    2. Linux
      1. New translations
      2. Existing translations
  2. Submitting your new translation for inclusion
  3. Translation RSS feeds
    1. Prerelease builds

How to help by translating FahMon

FahMon uses gettext compatible message catalogs to manage translations of the various textual elements of the code.

For end users this means absolutely nothing, they just expect to receive a copy of FahMon translated into their language, and have to do no manual configuration at all.
This is in fact exactly what happens. FahMon itself will check for the required language files, and if found, will use them automatically based upon the language set by the operating system.

For translators this means you have to translate a specially formatted text file.
The file you'll need it called fahmon.pot (the translation template) which can always be obtained from here. You can also download specific existing translations from here.

To edit the translation template you will need a program like poedit (Windows/Linux) or KBabel (Linux).
You can in theory edit the file by hand, but the above programs contain error checking routines to catch things that you might miss if you edited by hand.

Make sure you know the name of your language definition. It is made up of the two letter language code from ISO 639-1 with the two letter country code from ISO 3166.

Testing your translations

Windows

  • Save the .pot file as a .po file and also export the .mo file using your catalog editor.
  • Rename the .po file to match your language definition (i.e. British English is en_GB, Brazilian Portuguese is pt_BR)
  • Make sure the .mo file is called fahmon.mo
  • Create a folder with the name of your language definition inside the lang folder (see existing folders)
  • Copy fahmon.mo into the new folder
  • Restart FahMon

Linux

First, please read the REQUIRES file provided with the source package, this will tell you the additional software you need to edit and create new translations.

New translations

  • Save fahmon.pot to your po folder, and rename it to <lang>.po
  • Edit the new po definition with your catalog editor
  • Open configure.ac found in the source root directory with a text editor and navigate down to ALL_LINGUAS, add your language to the existing list
  • Run ./reconf && ./configure && make update-gmo to compile the new language definition
  • Run sudo make install or su && make install to install the translation

Existing translations

  • Edit the existing .po file for your language found in the po folder of the source package
  • Do not export a .mo file
  • Run make update-gmo to compile the po file
  • Run sudo make install or su && make install to install the files to their correct locations
  • Restart FahMon

Submitting your new translation for inclusion

The best way is to create a ticket in trac and attach the .po file to it (compressing the po file first would be preferable).
Make sure you specify translation as the ticket type, and also set the milestone to be the version you are translating for.

Translation RSS feeds

In the news section of the website there is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to that will notify you of significant changes to the translation source

Prerelease builds

The RSS feeds also tell you about prerelease builds (and details about how to get them) so that you can be notified that translations for the next release are required more urgently.
If you have been keeping up to date with the trunk translations, this should mean you have less work to do.