All user-visible strings for the eGauge User Interface are stored in a single file called the PO-file. To update an existing translation, please download the PO-file for the desired language, edit it as needed, then send us the updated file.
To create a translation for a new language, please download the messages.pot file and rename that to LANGUAGE_CODE.po, where LANGUAGE_CODE is the code for the language your translating to. You don't need to worry about selecting the appropriate LANGUAGE_CODE if you are not sure - just use something unique so we can tell what language it is (for example, italian.po if you were to translate to Italian). Once you have this file, edit it as needed and then send it to us for review.
The PO-file is a plain text file so you can use any text-editor to modify it. However, since the file has some special formatting-requirements, it is usually much easier to use Poedit for this purpose. Poedit is open-source and available pre-built for Windows, OS X, and most versions of Linux.
Poedit is quite easy to use but here are some tips:
Most translations are just a single word, phrase or sentence. However, some translations, especially the ones for the Help page, are multiple paragraphs long with embedded HTML formatting. Special care needs to be taken to translate such entries:
word1will by transformed to "word1word2" when saved. It is therefore best to just use blanks to separate words. If you want a newline that gets preserved across saves, use the new line-sequence "\n".
word2
<a name="foobar">defines an anchor point named "foobar". Since this is not a user-visible strings, it should NOT be translated. If you do translate such entries, it'll likely break the user-interface since there may be other code that refers to the "foobar" name.
Some translations contain variable parts. When using a translation, software takes care of replacing the placeholders for the variable parts with actual values (which are already translated). Placeholders start with a percent sign (%). What follows the percent sign depends on the programming language of where the string appears:
The translator comments will normally indicate what the placeholders are for to make it easy to figure out how to translate the strings.
The eGauge user-interface uses patterns to assist in translating dates and times to user-readable strings. Similarly, patterns are used to specify how a date and/or time may be entered. Please see the Datetime Tester page for details.
Please send any PO-File work to i18n-team@egauge.net
for review.
eGauge Systems LLC
1644 Conestoga Street, Suite 2
Boulder, CO 80301
1-877-342-8431
1-720-545-9767
info@egauge.net