Translations

The translations of gPodder are managed in Git for now; previously we have been using Transifex, but since it can’t integrate directly with Git anymore, it’s easier for us to accept translations via pull requests.

Applications

This is a selection of translation-editing software that you can use to open and edit the .po files that you download from Transifex:

Missing plural header

Recent development of GPodder (v.2.1) includes Gettext plural forms.

PO headers needs to be checked for plural support for your language, e.g. for spanish:

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

i.e. two forms, singular used for one only, should be included.

See Gettext Manual and search for the plural formula related to your language.

New languages should take POT file and initialize it, e.g a spanish PO could be generated via:

msginit --locale=es --input=gpodder.master.messages.pot

Without this plural declaration no tabs for plural should be shown in Poedit or other applications, hence the need for it.

Testing your translation

If the language you translate for is the language set in your system/session, all you need to do in your Git checkout is run make messages in your source folder (which will compile the translations to be usable by gettext), followed by make test, which will run gPodder from the source checkout folder.

Testing translations with different system language

Thanks to Silvio Sisto for the initial idea of testing the language this way.

Problem:

You have your system running in, say, English and want to test your translation into, say, Spanish.

Solution:

Check if the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales already generates the files for es_ES.UTF-8 (or similiar). If it does, you can skip the next step.
If es_ES.UTF-8 has not been generated, install Spanish language support via sudo aptitude install language-support-es. This will install the whole language support for Spanish for all apps

In your Git checkout run:

make messages
export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
make test

Because you have entered export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 in an interactive shell, the rest of the system will not be affected, and closing down that session will also forget the language setting for this session.
If you don’t need the Spanish translation files anymore, and because you have installed with aptitude, it will remove the dependencies when uninstalled: sudo aptitude remove language-support-es. This frees up the space taken by langugage-support-es + its dependencies (as of writing this guide, that’s 66MB)