This is meant as a short overview of the peculiarities of those file formats in the process of doc translation -- basically, you already know them from the part on GUI translation.
The files that have to be translated are in Unicode UTF-8 format with the extension .pot
and .po
. But this is only for the convenience of translators. Originally, the English documentation is included in DocBook files (see above). Once the documentation author commits a documentation to the SVN, the program xml2pot extracts the translatable strings from the file. It then writes those strings to a POT
file. Basically, the resulting POTs do not differ too much from what you already know from the GUI files.
The next paragraph is outdated. The update_xml must be run by hand to create the translated DocBook documentation file.
The English POT
file is the common ground for the translation teams which produce for each POT
file one PO
for their language. These localized PO
files provide the translated strings, from which the program po2xml produces the translated DocBook file. po2xml is regularly run on the l10n.kde.org server. If a KDE user eventually has set the standard language in KDE to for example "German" or "Icelandic" and opens the KDE help center, this translated DocBook files are processed by the help ioslave from Stephan Kulow and the resulting HTML files are shown on screen. The automatic generation of the translated DocBook files by po2xml require the PO
files to be syntactically correct.
You can find the English DocBook documentation in subdirectories of the source code for the corresponding package. The POT
files and the translated PO
files and DocBook files for all languages are located in the KDE package named kde-i18n. For the package "EXAMPLE" you will find
the POT
files in the directory l10n/templates/docmessages/(EXAMPLE)
the translated PO
files in the directory l10n/$LANGUAGE/docmessages/(EXAMPLE)/
the English documentation files in the directory l10n/documentation/(EXAMPLE)/doc/
(you need this file to generate the translated DocBook file)
the translated documentation (in DocBook format) in the directory l10n/$LANGUAGE/docs/(EXAMPLE)