1TRANSLATING VIM MESSAGES 2 3In this directory you will find xx.po files, where "xx" is a language code. 4Each file contains the translation of English Vim messages for one language. 5The files are in "po" format, used by the gettext package. Please refer to 6the gettext documentation for more information. 7 8The GNU gettext library, starting with version 0.10.37, supports converting 9messages from one encoding to another. This requires that it was compiled 10with HAVE_ICONV. The result is that the messages may be in any encoding 11supported by iconv and will be automatically converted to the currently used 12encoding. 13 14The GNU gettext library, starting with version 0.10.36, uses a new format for 15some encodings. This follows the C99 standard for strings. It means that 16when a multi-byte character includes the 0x5c byte, this is not recognized as 17a backslash. Since this format is incompatible with Solaris, Vim uses the old 18format. This is done by setting the OLD_PO_FILE_OUTPUT and OLD_PO_FILE_INPUT 19environment variables. When you use the Makefile in this directory that will 20be done for you. This does NOT work with gettext 0.10.36. Don't use it, get 210.10.37. 22 23 24ON MS-WINDOWS 25 26The distributed files are generated on Unix, but this should also be possible 27on MS-Windows. Download the gettext packages, for example from: 28 29 http://sourceforge.net/projects/gettext 30 31You might have to do the commands manually. Example: 32 33 cd c:\vim\vim71 34 mkdir runtime\lang\ja\LC_MESSAGES 35 msgfmt -o runtime\lang\ja\LC_MESSAGES\vim.mo src\po\ja.po 36 37 38WHEN THERE IS A MISTAKE 39 40If you find there is a mistake in one of the translations, please report this 41to the maintainer of the translation. His/her E-mail address is in the 42comments at the start of the file. You can also see this with the ":messages" 43command in Vim when the translation is being used. 44 45 46CREATING A NEW PO FILE 47 48We will use "xx.po" as an example here, replace "xx" with the name of your 49language. 50 51- Edit Makefile to add xx to LANGUAGES and xx.mo to MOFILES. 52- Copy the header of an existing file, e.g., de.po, to xx.po. Do not copy any 53 of the translated messages, delete everything after the "msgstr". 54- The remaining work is like updating, see the next section. 55 56 57UPDATING A PO FILE 58 59If you are the maintainer of a .po file, this is how you update the file. We 60will use "xx.po" as an example here, replace "xx" with the name of your 61language. 62 63(1) Add new and changed messages from the Vim sources: 64 65 make xx 66 67 This will extract all the strings from Vim and merge them in with the 68 existing translations. Requires the GNU gettext utilities. Also requires 69 unpacking the extra archive. 70 Your original xx.po file will be copied to xx.po.orig 71 72 -- After you do this, you MUST do the next three steps! -- 73 74(2) Translate 75 See the gettext documentation on how to do this. You can also find 76 examples in the other po files. 77 Search the po file for items that require translation: 78 79 /fuzzy\|^msgstr ""\(\n"\)\@! 80 81 Remove the "#, fuzzy" line after adding the translation. 82 83 There is one special message: 84 msgid "Messages maintainer: Bram Moolenaar <Bram@vim.org>" 85 You should include your name and E-mail address instead, for example: 86 msgstr "Berichten �bersetzt bei: John Doe <john@doe.org>" 87 88(3) Clean up 89 This is very important to make sure the translation works on all systems. 90 Comment-out all non-translated strings. There are two types: 91 - items marked with "#, fuzzy" 92 - items with an empty msgstr 93 You can do this with the cleanup.vim script: 94 95 :source cleanup.vim 96 97 Background: on Solaris an empty msgstr results in an empty message; GNU 98 gettext ignores empty strings and items marked with "#, fuzzy". 99 100 This also removes the line numbers from the file, so that patches are not 101 messed up by changes in line numbers and show the actual changes in the 102 text. 103 104(4) Check: 105 106 vim -S check.vim xx.po 107 make xx.mo 108 109 Look out for syntax errors and fix them. 110