Still actually working on that new project of mine, we (Pockey and I) finished Gcompris localization in Chinese last Saturday. Ok, most of the work was done with 98% completed, which shows a huge increase from 6 months ago actually where less than half was translated into Chinese. Gcompris is an educational software suite which proposes different activities to children from 2 to 10 years old. Gcompris po files are available from the Gnome website where you can find a few other languages that need completion. Coordinating the Gnome Chinese translation effort it is worth mentioning that you can find BLUG member and occasional presenter Funda Wang (Yeah BLUG again).
This being said we have also started localizing Hex-a-hop, a puzzle game with 100 levels. The internationalization process was completed last year in July by Jens Seidel, who has developed the patches for making it work with SDLPango and to support all the spectrum of Unicode characters. With debian packages, the process of getting the po file is a big more “complicated”. In fact there are two ways, one given to me by Miriam Ruiz (Hex-a-hop maintainer at debian) and one by Anthony Fok (BLUG member among so many other things, and great Linux contributor). So here we go (for those who would like to actually translate other debian projects):
miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ apt-get source hex-a-hop Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Need to get 1020kB of source archives. Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (dsc) [1004B] Get:2 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (tar) [892kB] Get:3 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (diff) [127kB] Fetched 1020kB in 1s (577kB/s) dpkg-source: extracting hex-a-hop in hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315 dpkg-source: info: unpacking hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315.orig.tar.gz dpkg-source: info: applying hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6.diff.gz miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ find . -name "*.po" ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/bg.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ru.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ja.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/vi.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ta.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/pl.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/nl.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/es.po ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/de.po miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ find . -name "*.pot" ./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/hex-a-hop.pot
Then you just need to open the .pot file with poedit. Second method is to convert the .mo file which you can get from the binary deb file back into a .po file typing:
wget http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/hex-a-hop/hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6_i386.deb dpkg-deb -x hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6_i386.deb testdir cd testdir/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES msgunfmt hex-a-hop.mo > hex-a-hop.po
Now there is a good explanation here on the translation process used in FOSS for those of you wanting to understand more. Should you want to join us and help, please don’t hesitate to contact me. If you want to translate other applications that you feel should be in your language but are having problems with it, I won’t mind helping out neither.