Translating Wammu and Gammu

If you know English and some other language, you can just bring Gammu and Wammu closer to the users who don't know English. Translating process is really easy and you can just occasionally translate few texts and do not have to spend much time on it.

Gettext

All Gammu, Wammu and this website use gettext framework for translation of messages in user interface. In addition, Gammu uses gettext together with po4a to translate documentation. There exists variety of tools which can handle gettext translations, so you can choose the one which fits your needs.

Translating po Files

Traditional way of doing translations is to download po file, translate it using some editor (for example Poedit) and then send updated po file to the author. You can do this when you are offline, but on the other side, it somehow prevents collaboration.

Weblate

Another option is to use some web based system for translation, where lot of people can work on single translation as they just translate one text at once. We currently use Weblate to manage translations. To start translating just create an account there and start translating. You can already see dozens of languages there, but if your one is missing, just tell us and we will add it. There are separate translations projects:

All languages are open to translated for anybody logged in by default. However if you want to have better control on some language tell us to allow others only to suggest translations. This usually brings better quality of translation and slower progress, so it's up to each translator to define policy.

Hints for Translators

In menu items, there is often used ampresand (&), it means keybord shortcut for menu item. Please make those shortcuts unique in each menu.

Please test the translations in the program. Just download mo file from translation system and place it under /usr/share/locale/aa/LC_MESSAGES/wammu.mo, where aa is two letter code of your translation.

You should follow terminology as defined for your language in dictionary for the project. If it is not defined, you can help creating one!

What is Important?

If you will get to translation in bad shape, there is too much work. Use the following rules to find the most important things:

  1. libGammu messages - there is just few of them and they are used also in Wammu. It is just good place to start and get to know some basic terminology.
  2. Wammu translation - the is the application which is most frequently used by users with little English knowledge.
  3. Gammu translation - it's nice to have but not really a high priority.
  4. Wammu website - there is lot of texts here and it's great to have the website translated for new users.
  5. Gammu documentation - it would be great to have this translated to many languages, but it is huge amount of text to translate.