Having pgAdminIII translated into as many languages as possible and maintaining translations of high quality is essential. People will not use a tool that they do not understand! The pgAdminIII Project always needs new contributors. You do not need any particular skill, except understanding English, writing your own language correctly and motivation.

Let's see how you can contribute to this project.

First step: contact any existing translators for your language

Reference: the Translation Status Page on pgAminIII's website.

Their might already be contributors to the translation of pgAdmin into your language listed on this page. If this is the case, you should get in touch with them and ask them how you can help. If the page is not up to date, you should warn us.

Second step: download the translation files

The applications are translated using pot files, with a 'po' extension: those files basically contain each English string and its translation. There is also a template for creating a pot file for a new translation: it is the file which has a 'pot' extension. In beta tests time, every time a developper changes a string in the application, he will update the pot files and the translation will have to be updated accordingly. Developers use one shell script to merge the pot file with each already existing po file.

So, all you need to do is downloading the .po file of your language in the translation status page of pgAdminIII's website. If you start a new translation, you shoud ask us. You can also download the pot file from the web SVN browser.

Third step: start translating

If there is a file for your language, you will be able to start translating directly. If not, you will have to create a file for your language by copying the pot file and renaming it with a .po suffix. To find your locale identifier, you can use this page.

To translate, you can use a text editor or .po file editor.

If you want to use a simple text editor, open the po file using your favorite one. You will see a main header composed of likes similar to this:

"Project-Id-Version: pgadmin3\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2009-01-11 00:20+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2009-02-11 13:20+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume@lelarge.info>\n"
"Language-Team: French <fr@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

Update the PO-Revision-Date field with the current date and time and the Last-Translator field with your name and your email so that the next translator can contact you if he has some questions. After that you can start the real translation job.

Every sentence already translated is displayed in the po file as the following one:

msgid "Invalid file name"
msgstr "Nom de fichier non valide"

Untranslated strings are displayed as this one:

msgid "Only local files may be renamed"
msgstr ""

Some strings may also be marked as fuzzy, which means that the original sentence has changed a bit and that the translation is not totally wrong but still needs to be checked and/or fixed. Make sure to remove the '#,fuzzy' after fixing the string.

#, fuzzy
msgid "Screenshot.png"
msgstr " Screenshot"

msgid allows you to identify the original string and msgstr to identify the translated strings. Modifying the msgid strings will have no effect, if you see a typo in one of them, file a bug. To translate a string or update a translation, just modify the text between the "" in the msgstr field.

Some strings may contain slashes or weird characters such as "%s" or "%i". You should always make sure that those characters are also present in the translated string in the same order, or the application will be broken in your language. To check if your translation is valid, you should use the msgfmt tool:

msgfmt -o pgadmin3.mo pgadmin3.po

If it displays any warning, you must fix it before sharing your translation.

You can also use this tool to see the stats for a given po file, that is to say the number of translated messages, the number of fuzzy and untranslated ones:

msgfmt --statistics -o pgadmin3.mo pgadmin3.po

If you don't want to use a text editor, you can use a more advanced tool. There are a lot in the free software world. The one I prefer is poedit, but use the one you feel comfortable with. You can use it to modify the po files. It updated the po headers automatically, sorts the strings by category (translated, fuzzy and untranslated) and provides a friendly interface.

Fourth step: get your translation in

Once you are done with your translations, if there is already a maintainer for your language, you should send him this file asking him politely to review it and get it in. If not, you should compress your .po file and sent it to me (guillaume AT lelarge DOT info) or to the pgAdminIII's hackers mailing list.

We include your translation in pgAdminIII's package when there are more than 85% of translated strings.

Fifth step: this tutorial sucks and you need more information

The pgAdminIII's website contains a lot of information on its translation page. If you have any questions, please ask them on the pgAdminIII's hackers mailing list.

I hope that I was clear enough and that we will be flooded with new or improved translations! We need you!

PS : I've written this text after reading "Translating XFCE". In fact, many parts of this text is a copy and paste from the one I read. So, many thanks to the XFCE team. And shame on me for stealing big parts of their great text :)