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<section>

    <title>Localization</title>

    <para>The localization work line exists to provide the translation
    messages required to produce content in different languages.
    Translation messages inside the repository are stored as portable
    objects (e.g., .po, .pot) and machine objects (.mo) under
    @file{trunk/Locales} directory structure.</para>
    
    <para>The procedure used to localize content is taken from
    @command{gettext} standard specification.  Basically, translatable
    strings are retrived from source files in order to create portable
    objects and machine objects for them.  These portable objects are
    editable files that contain the information used by translators to
    localize the translatable strings retrived from source files. On
    the other hand, machine objects are produced to be machine-redable
    only, as its name implies, and are produced from portable
    objects.</para>
    
    <para>Since @command{gettext} needs to extract translatable
    strings form source files in order to let translators to localize
    them, we are limitted to use source files supported by
    @command{gettext} program.  This is not a limitation at all since
    @command{gettext} supports most popular programming laguages
    (e.g., C, C++, Java, Bash, Python, Perl, PHP and GNU Awk just to
    mention a few ones). Nevertheless, formats like SVG, XHTML and
    Docbook don't figure as supported formats in the list of
    @command{gettext} supported source files.</para>
    
    <para>To translate XML based source files like SVG, XHTML and
    Docbook we use the @command{xml2po} program instead.  The
    @command{xml2po} comes with the @file{gnome-doc-utils} package and
    retrives translatable strings from one XML file to produce
    portable objects for them.</para>
    
    <note> <para>Portable objects produced by @command{xml2po} have
    the same format that portable objects produced by
    @command{gettext}. This make the localization process quite
    consistent from translators' point of view.  No matter what the
    source file be, the translator will always face the same
    translation file format (i.e., the portable object format).</para>
    </note>
    
    <para>With the portable object in place, the @command{xml2po}
    program is used again to create the final translated XML, just
    with the same definition of the source file where translatable
    strings were taken from (e.g., if we extract translatable strings
    from a SVG file, as result we get the same SVG file but with
    translatable strings already localized ---obviously, for this to
    happen translators need to localize translatable strings inside
    the portable object first, localization won't appear as art of
    magic---).  When using @command{xml2po}, the machine object is
    used as temporal file to produce the final translated XML
    file.</para>
    
    <tip><para>If you want to have your content localized inside
    CentOS Artwork Repository be sure to use source files supported
    either by @command{gettext} or @command{xml2po}
    programs.</para></tip>
    
    <para>@xref{Directories trunk Locales}, for more
    information.</para>
    
</section>