Localization
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
@xref{Directories trunk Locales}, for more
information.