gettext: Header Entry
6.2 Filling in the Header Entry
===============================
The initial comments "SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE", "YEAR" and "FIRST
AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR" ought to be replaced by sensible
information. This can be done in any text editor; if Emacs is used and
it switched to PO mode automatically (because it has recognized the
file’s suffix), you can disable it by typing ‘M-x fundamental-mode’.
Modifying the header entry can already be done using PO mode: in
Emacs, type ‘M-x po-mode RET’ and then ‘RET’ again to start editing the
entry. You should fill in the following fields.
Project-Id-Version
This is the name and version of the package. Fill it in if it has
not already been filled in by ‘xgettext’.
Report-Msgid-Bugs-To
This has already been filled in by ‘xgettext’. It contains an
email address or URL where you can report bugs in the untranslated
strings:
- Strings which are not entire sentences, see the maintainer
guidelines in ⇒Preparing Strings.
- Strings which use unclear terms or require additional context
to be understood.
- Strings which make invalid assumptions about notation of date,
time or money.
- Pluralisation problems.
- Incorrect English spelling.
- Incorrect formatting.
POT-Creation-Date
This has already been filled in by ‘xgettext’.
PO-Revision-Date
You don’t need to fill this in. It will be filled by the PO file
editor when you save the file.
Last-Translator
Fill in your name and email address (without double quotes).
Language-Team
Fill in the English name of the language, and the email address or
homepage URL of the language team you are part of.
Before starting a translation, it is a good idea to get in touch
with your translation team, not only to make sure you don’t do
duplicated work, but also to coordinate difficult linguistic
issues.
In the Free Translation Project, each translation team has its own
mailing list. The up-to-date list of teams can be found at the
Free Translation Project’s homepage,
<https://translationproject.org/>, in the "Teams" area.
Language
Fill in the language code of the language. This can be in one of
three forms:
- ‘LL’, an ISO 639 two-letter language code (lowercase). See
⇒Language Codes for the list of codes.
- ‘LL_CC’, where ‘LL’ is an ISO 639 two-letter language code
(lowercase) and ‘CC’ is an ISO 3166 two-letter country code
(uppercase). The country code specification is not redundant:
Some languages have dialects in different countries. For
example, ‘de_AT’ is used for Austria, and ‘pt_BR’ for Brazil.
The country code serves to distinguish the dialects. See
⇒Language Codes and ⇒Country Codes for the lists
of codes.
- ‘LL_CC@VARIANT’, where ‘LL’ is an ISO 639 two-letter language
code (lowercase), ‘CC’ is an ISO 3166 two-letter country code
(uppercase), and ‘VARIANT’ is a variant designator. The
variant designator (lowercase) can be a script designator,
such as ‘latin’ or ‘cyrillic’.
The naming convention ‘LL_CC’ is also the way locales are named on
systems based on GNU libc. But there are three important
differences:
• In this PO file field, but not in locale names, ‘LL_CC’
combinations denoting a language’s main dialect are
abbreviated as ‘LL’. For example, ‘de’ is equivalent to
‘de_DE’ (German as spoken in Germany), and ‘pt’ to ‘pt_PT’
(Portuguese as spoken in Portugal) in this context.
• In this PO file field, suffixes like ‘.ENCODING’ are not used.
• In this PO file field, variant designators that are not
relevant to message translation, such as ‘@euro’, are not
used.
So, if your locale name is ‘de_DE.UTF-8’, the language
specification in PO files is just ‘de’.
Content-Type
Replace ‘CHARSET’ with the character encoding used for your
language, in your locale, or UTF-8. This field is needed for
correct operation of the ‘msgmerge’ and ‘msgfmt’ programs, as well
as for users whose locale’s character encoding differs from yours
(see ⇒Charset conversion).
You get the character encoding of your locale by running the shell
command ‘locale charmap’. If the result is ‘C’ or
‘ANSI_X3.4-1968’, which is equivalent to ‘ASCII’ (= ‘US-ASCII’), it
means that your locale is not correctly configured. In this case,
ask your translation team which charset to use. ‘ASCII’ is not
usable for any language except Latin.
Because the PO files must be portable to operating systems with
less advanced internationalization facilities, the character
encodings that can be used are limited to those supported by both
GNU ‘libc’ and GNU ‘libiconv’. These are: ‘ASCII’, ‘ISO-8859-1’,
‘ISO-8859-2’, ‘ISO-8859-3’, ‘ISO-8859-4’, ‘ISO-8859-5’,
‘ISO-8859-6’, ‘ISO-8859-7’, ‘ISO-8859-8’, ‘ISO-8859-9’,
‘ISO-8859-13’, ‘ISO-8859-14’, ‘ISO-8859-15’, ‘KOI8-R’, ‘KOI8-U’,
‘KOI8-T’, ‘CP850’, ‘CP866’, ‘CP874’, ‘CP932’, ‘CP949’, ‘CP950’,
‘CP1250’, ‘CP1251’, ‘CP1252’, ‘CP1253’, ‘CP1254’, ‘CP1255’,
‘CP1256’, ‘CP1257’, ‘GB2312’, ‘EUC-JP’, ‘EUC-KR’, ‘EUC-TW’, ‘BIG5’,
‘BIG5-HKSCS’, ‘GBK’, ‘GB18030’, ‘SHIFT_JIS’, ‘JOHAB’, ‘TIS-620’,
‘VISCII’, ‘GEORGIAN-PS’, ‘UTF-8’.
In the GNU system, the following encodings are frequently used for
the corresponding languages.
• ‘ISO-8859-1’ for Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Catalan,
Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish,
French, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Indonesian,
Irish, Italian, Malay, Manx, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese,
Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Uzbek, Walloon,
• ‘ISO-8859-2’ for Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish,
Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian,
• ‘ISO-8859-3’ for Maltese,
• ‘ISO-8859-5’ for Macedonian, Serbian,
• ‘ISO-8859-6’ for Arabic,
• ‘ISO-8859-7’ for Greek,
• ‘ISO-8859-8’ for Hebrew,
• ‘ISO-8859-9’ for Turkish,
• ‘ISO-8859-13’ for Latvian, Lithuanian, Maori,
• ‘ISO-8859-14’ for Welsh,
• ‘ISO-8859-15’ for Basque, Catalan, Dutch, English, Finnish,
French, Galician, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish,
Swedish, Walloon,
• ‘KOI8-R’ for Russian,
• ‘KOI8-U’ for Ukrainian,
• ‘KOI8-T’ for Tajik,
• ‘CP1251’ for Bulgarian, Belarusian,
• ‘GB2312’, ‘GBK’, ‘GB18030’ for simplified writing of Chinese,
• ‘BIG5’, ‘BIG5-HKSCS’ for traditional writing of Chinese,
• ‘EUC-JP’ for Japanese,
• ‘EUC-KR’ for Korean,
• ‘TIS-620’ for Thai,
• ‘GEORGIAN-PS’ for Georgian,
• ‘UTF-8’ for any language, including those listed above.
When single quote characters or double quote characters are used in
translations for your language, and your locale’s encoding is one
of the ISO-8859-* charsets, it is best if you create your PO files
in UTF-8 encoding, instead of your locale’s encoding. This is
because in UTF-8 the real quote characters can be represented
(single quote characters: U+2018, U+2019, double quote characters:
U+201C, U+201D), whereas none of ISO-8859-* charsets has them all.
Users in UTF-8 locales will see the real quote characters, whereas
users in ISO-8859-* locales will see the vertical apostrophe and
the vertical double quote instead (because that’s what the
character set conversion will transliterate them to).
To enter such quote characters under X11, you can change your
keyboard mapping using the ‘xmodmap’ program. The X11 names of the
quote characters are "leftsinglequotemark", "rightsinglequotemark",
"leftdoublequotemark", "rightdoublequotemark",
"singlelowquotemark", "doublelowquotemark".
Note that only recent versions of GNU Emacs support the UTF-8
encoding: Emacs 20 with Mule-UCS, and Emacs 21. As of January
2001, XEmacs doesn’t support the UTF-8 encoding.
The character encoding name can be written in either upper or lower
case. Usually upper case is preferred.
Content-Transfer-Encoding
Set this to ‘8bit’.
Plural-Forms
This field is optional. It is only needed if the PO file has
plural forms. You can find them by searching for the
‘msgid_plural’ keyword. The format of the plural forms field is
DONTPRINTYET described in ⇒Plural forms and *noteTranslating plural
DONTPRINTYET described in ⇒Plural forms and ⇒Translating plural
forms.
Info Catalog
gettext: msginit Invocation
gettext: Creating