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2.2.1 How to Submit a Translation in PO Format

All translations¹ are maintained via GNUN, which significantly eases maintenance and avoids the unpleasant situation where a translation is lagging behind the original. See Advantages in The GNUnited Nations Manual.

Since September 2008 all new translations at gnu.org are installed in .po format, and the .html is generated automatically. Here are the steps to produce and submit such a translation:

• Make a checkout of the CVS Web repository of the ‘www’ Savannah project. You can find generic instructions at https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=www. All updates to the website are done as commits in the repository, so you would need an up-to-date working copy. Anonymous access works under any circumstances, i.e. it is not mandatory to have a registered account at Savannah to use it. You can also check out only a specific directory, for example:

  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/www co www/gnu
  

  This command will fetch only the /gnu directory—in other words, all articles at https://www.gnu.org/gnu.

  You can also fetch single files by their respective URLs. For example, the URL for the template file of https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html is https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/free-sw.pot; the URL for its lang PO file (when available) is always https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/free-sw.lang.po:

  wget https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/free-sw.pot
  

• Assuming you already know the article you want to translate, you have to create an empty article.lang.po file and then translate all messages with a PO editor. See New Translation in The GNUnited Nations Manual. For an almost complete list of PO editors, see Editing PO Files.
• When you are pleased with the translation, check that the PO file is valid and submit it to web-translators@gnu.org, attached to your message. The web-translators will review (to the best of their ability) the translation and will install it in the repository.
• In order for GNUN to be able to generate (and subsequently update) a fully translated page, the language should have the server templates available as PO files. These templates are short, and translating them shouldn’t take much time. If the language code is present in the TEMPLATE_LINGUAS variable at server/gnun/gnun.mk, then you don’t have to do anything. If it is not, the required files are defined via the extra-templates variable in server/gnun/gnun.mk—you can translate and submit them in the usual way, together with the translation of the essay.

  If you don’t want to translate the templates for whatever reason—do not worry, the web-translators will install empty templates (which means the English strings will be used).

It is quite possible that there will be errors or typos, so once you are informed that the translation is online, check it carefully and if necessary, resubmit the PO file with corrections. Do not forget to run cvs update first and edit the updated .po file from the repository—most probably the Translation Managers have already made some modifications to it, usually to fix validation errors and to complete the PO file header.