Welsh Language Translation

[Mark Doliner]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Cole <trollsb at trollsb.com> wrote:
> I have just joined the list as I was looking to help/start a Welsh language
> translation

If you haven't read it already,
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/TipsForTranslators might contain
useful information for you.

> what I am unsure of however is how to test to .po when I make
> a new one.

Translators might have cleaner ways to do this, but if you have Pidgin
installed you could probably just compile your .po file to a .gmo file
and place it next to all the other installed Pidgin translations.
When you restart Pidgin it should find your new translation
automatically.

The command to compile a po file to a gmo file is:
msgfmt -o cy.gmo cy.po
If you're using a GUI for translation, it might be able to do this for
you.  Also, if you're using Windows I'm guessing you won't have msgfmt
installed.  You could probably install it along with cygwin, if you
really wanted to.

On Linux the gmo file will probably be installed to somewhere like:
/usr/share/locale/cy/LC_MESSAGES/pidgin.mo
Note that it's generally recommended that people not change files in
/usr/share/ directly, since these files are usually managed by your
distributions package manager.  You could do it anyway, since this
usage isn't egregious, or you could compile Pidgin yourself and
install to a local prefix (like /home/cole/mypidgin/).

I'm not sure where these files live on Windows.

To specify Welsh when starting Pidgin, start it with:
LANGUAGE=cy pidgin

> Also I saw a bit of a thing about plurals – but I can’t see where
> they are applied.

I'm not sure what you're asking.

In English there are two plural forms:
"1 file"
"2 files"

Some languages have more plural forms.  Here's the Polish example:
"1 plik"
"2,3,4 pliki"
"5-21 pliko'w"
"22-24 pliki"
"25-31 pliko'w"

You should specify a value for Plural-Forms at the top of your po
file.  You can probably look up what this value should be for Welsh
and just use that.  I don't know whether this is accurate, but Welsh
is listed here: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms

The GNU gettext manual has good information about translating plural forms:
 http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Translating-plural-forms