Introduction

Rubyripper offers the option to translate Rubyripper into your own language. It uses the well known gettext program to do so.

If you'd like to help, you don't need to know anything about programming. You do need to have reasonably knowledge of English and the language you'd like to translate it to.

Create your language file

First get latest Git. Look for instructions in the wiki page.

Using Poedit It is recommended to use the program Poedit. It should be available in most distros. In the file menu, you can select new catalogue from POT-file. This is the po template. You'll find the POT file at $HOME/rubyripper/locale/po/rubyripper.pot. Then select your language there. All files are encoded in UTF-8, so select this as well. When you need to give a name for your po file, name it rubyripper.po.

Using brains Instead of using Poedit, you can also do it the hard way. Wherever nl or nl_NL is mentioned you should replace this with the locale code of your language.

• cd $HOME/rubyripper/locale/po
• mkdir nl
• LANG=nl_NL msginit -i rubyripper.pot -o nl/rubyripper.po

Start translation

Using Poedit In the first column is the original listed, in the second column the translation. When clicked on a row, the message will show on the lower part of the screen. You can enter the translation in the lowest part. You go through the different sentences with Cntr-down and Ctrl-up. It may be handy to first copy the text, then translate it.

Using brains The created po-file can be edited by your favourite editor. The first row shows the original text. The second row allows you to enter the translated text.

Any value like %s should stay intact. They will be replaced with some variable. Make sure not to forget spaces and newlines (\n).

Getting it merged

If this is your first time contributing, open up a new issue and post your rubyripper.po file.

Keeping it up-to-date

When you'd like to update an existing translation, make sure you:

1. Pull the latest Git
2. run ./configure --update-lang

You can continue with editing the po file.

Every changed (text)string results in a #fuzzy comment in your po file. You should check if the translation needs to be changed, then remove the comment. Every new string will have to be translated as well ofcourse.

Text freeze before release

The e-mail adress in the po-file will be used to alert you when a new release is coming. To enhance the user experience everyone is asked to update their translations at the rubyripper-release mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyripper-release. Most often this is only about 10-30 minutes of work.