[wp-polyglots] Romanian translation and some questions about PO file elements

[Kimmo Suominen]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 11:50:07AM +0300, Andrei Maxim wrote:
> I'm trying to translate Wordpress to Romanian as the current ro.mo file is
> somewhat lacking (the day and month names shouldn't start with capital
> letter, there are no glyphs in the text and some words are misspelled, the

While month and day names are spelled with lowercase in Finnish, too,
they still need to be capitalized when they are in the beginning of
a sentence.

Since the month names show up in the archive links, where they should
also be capitalized, there was no simple solution: code would be needed
in the theme to change the casing anyway.  I think there was another
reason for my choice also, such as not being able to easily capitalize
the archive link text.  (Lowercasing the date string when formatting
each post is easy to accomplish in the theme.)

The same may apply in Romanian.

> text for some buttons is too long, etc). Also, there isn't a PO file, just
> the ro.mo, available at some web design company's website.

You can create a po file from a mo file:

    msgunfmt -o ro.po ro.mo

The ordering in the resulting po file is "random" and lacks all the
source file referenes.  You may want try to improve that by merging the
resulting po file with the pot file.  I have not tried that, so I don't
know if it will help.

> Therefore, I started translating Wordpress to Romanian and I have some
> questions regarding the PO file:
> 
>   - there are some elements like "Jan_January_abbreviation" or
>   "S_Sunday_initial". How should these be translated? Just the
>   abbreviation/initial like "I" or "D", or the entire string (in my case, it
>   would be Ian_Ianuarie_abreviere)?

Only the text until the first underscore (_) is translated.  The
abbreviation should be the common abbreviation in your language.  In
other words, you can use an abbreviation of a different length, if
that's more natural to your language.

Best regards,
+ Kimmo
-- 
<A HREF="http://kimmo.suominen.com/">Kimmo Suominen</A>