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Edit File: Translations.html

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<title>ProFTPD mini-HOWTO - Translations</title>
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<center><h2>Translations</h2></center>
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Translations 
ProFTPD has support for translating the messages sent to clients in the
FTP responses. To enable use of these translations in your
<code>proftpd</code>, you must compile proftpd using the <code>--enable-nls</code> configure option. This causes the <a href="../modules/mod_lang.html"><code>mod_lang</code></a> module to be compiled into your <code>proftpd</code>.

ProFTPD uses the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html"><code>gettext</code></a> code package for translation support.

Adding a New Translation 
To add a new language translation to <code>proftpd</code>, first check to see
if the language in question already has a translation. ProFTPD's translations
are kept, in the source distribution, under the <code>locale/</code> directory,
e.g.:
<pre>
 ls /path/to/proftpd-version/locale/*.po
</pre>

To create a new translation, you first initialize a <code>.po</code> file
for your translation using the template PO file (<code>proftpd.pot</code>):
<pre>
 cd proftpd-version/locale/
 msginit -i proftpd.pot -o lang.po -l lang
</pre>
Then you simply use an editor to edit the generated <code>lang.po</code>
file, adding in the translated versions of the English messages. There are
some good editors out there which greatly aid in editing <code>.po</code>
files:
<ul>
 <li><a href="http://code.google.com/p/poeditor/">POEditor</a>
 <li><a href="http://kbabel.kde.org/">KBabel</a>
</ul>

Testing a Translation 
Once you think your <code>.po</code> file is ready, you should run some
quick checks to make sure. First, compare your <code>.po</code> file against
the template <code>.pot</code> file to see if you translated all of the
messages in the template. This is accomplished using the <code>msgcmp</code>
command:
<pre>
 cd proftpd-version/locale/
 msgcmp lang.po proftpd.pot
</pre>

Finally, compile your <code>.po</code> file into the machine-specific
<code>.mo</code> file; this is what the <code>gettext</code> library uses
in the running code:
<pre>
 msgfmt --check-format lang.po -o lang.mo
</pre>
The <code>--check-format</code> option checks that your <code>.po</code> is
properly formatted, and can be compiled without errors.

Submitting Translations 
Once your <code>.po</code> file has been tested and looks ready, simply
open a feature request at:
<pre>
 <a href="http://bugs.proftpd.org/">http://bugs.proftpd.org/</a>
</pre>
to request that the new translation be added to ProFTPD. Upload your
<code>.po</code> file as an attachment to the opened feature request.

Keeping Translations Updated 
Note that as ProFTPD is developed, new messages may be added to the template
<code>.pot</code> file, or existing messages may be changed slightly.
It is important to keep ProFTPD's translations up-to-date. You can help
by periodically checking the existing translations:
<pre>
 cd proftpd-version/locale/
 make check
</pre>
If you see that a language translation is out of date and you can help,
simply update the <code>.po</code> file that language, and open a bug request
and attach the diff, or send the diff to the ProFTPD developers mailing list.

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$Date: 2008-10-08 16:55:34 $

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