[wp-polyglots] The 1.5 POT and The Translation Repository

[Ryan Boren]

The 1.5 POT file lives here:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/pot/trunk/wordpress.pot

Here is the script I use to extract strings and create the pot.

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/tools/trunk/wp-gettext

For 1.5, we're hoping that translation teams will provide localized
versions of WP, ready to download.  As discussed on the hackers list,
the default 1.5 theme is not completely marked up with gettext.  gettext
was not used in the theme templates because the syntax is confusing to
users wanting to modify their layout, especially the more complex stuff
involving sprintf and argument swapping.  Instead of using gettext, the
default theme will be translated in place. Each team will manage their
own localized version of the default theme.   This creates more work for
translators but will result in easier to understand templates for
speakers of all languages.  There really aren't that many strings in the
templates, so this scheme shouldn't be too burdensome.

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/ is the subversion repository
that will hold the po and mo files and the translated default theme for
each locale.  Here's a suggested file and directory organization for the
repository.

pot/trunk/wordpress.pot  -  The WP pot file
/tools/trunk/...         - wp-gettext and misc tools
...
es_ES/trunk/messages/es_ES.po  - es_ES po file
es_ES/trunk/messages/es_ES.mo  - es_ES mo file
es_ES/trunk/theme/... - es_ES version of the default theme
es_ES/trunk/dist/...  - Localized versions of license.txt and
readme.html
es_ES/trunk/tools/... - Scripts to make tarballs, etc.

To create an es_ES version of WP, the following can be scripted:

* Unzip/untar the default WP distribution.
* Copy es_ES.mo to wp-includes/languages/
* Copy es_ES/trunk/theme/* over the top of wp-content/themes/default/
* Edit WPLANG in wp-config-sample.php.  Set it to es_ES.  (You can even
localize the wp-config-sample.php filename if you like)
* Copy es_ES/trunk/dist/ files to the wp root.
* zip/tar everything back up.
* Make WordPress-es_ES-1.5.zip available for download.

Translation teams can use whatever tools they prefer to translate po
files.  Rosetta, poedit, whatever.  Teams can use the resources at
sourceforge or elsewhere if they like.  But, the final product should
find its way into the wordpress-i18n repository so that all translations
can be found in one place.

I'd like to give teams commit access to their slice of the
wordpress-i18n repository so that they can manage their translations on
their own.  If a given locale doesn't have the resources to manage
commits to subversion, we can take care of committing the translations.
Having some i18n repository sheriffs help out with such tasks would be
nice.

Thoughts?

Ryan