i18n Quick Tips

Kimchi uses GNU Gettext for internationalization. For those not familiar with gettext, the following quick tips should help you to easily perform some basic tasks related to kimchi i18n:

If you add new translatable strings to any existing *.html.tmpl file, Then you need to update the translation catalog and rebuild the object files under the top workspace directory, please make sure "./autogen.sh" have been completed successfully before run "make":

make -C po update-po
make -C po all

After which, Information about the messages that have/haven't been translated and also some fuzzy translations are provided. Fuzzy translations are translated by Gettext and possibly need some improvement which looks like this:

#, fuzzy
msgid "Untranslated sentences"
msgstr "Sentences translated by Gettext"

Remove the annotation with word "fuzzy" which starts with a pound sign and check whether the msgstr message is appropriate. If not, please have it changed to the correct one.

If you add a new *.html.tmpl file, Then you must add that file to the list of files that contain translatable strings:

echo "ui/pages/new.html.tmpl" >> po/POTFILES.in

If you want to add support for a new language, Then you must register the new language code and rebuild.

echo "xx_XX" >> po/LINGUAS
make -C po all

If you want to check the status of translations, Then run the following command:

rm po/*.gmo
make -C po update-gmo

Since the patch i18n patch could include non-ASCII characters, you will get the following prompt:

Which 8bit encoding should I declare [UTF-8]?

when you send the patch by git-send-email. You could just press ENTER to accept the UTF-8 as the encoding. Or you could specify it you git config like this:

[sendemail]
assume8bitEncoding = UTF-8