If you’re participating in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and is involved with the translation process, or just want a sure way to test your translations with the latest GNOME, then go get your copy of the GNOME Developer Kit now!

You could then download the message catalog file for the application you want to translate (in my case I got the Brazilian Portuguese file for Empathy) to your language and use poEdit (already included) to work on your translation. You can also take advantage of translate-toolkit to really do some serious QA work!

Once you’ve gone through the steps above, the best thing to do is file a new bug report choosing the Translations category and attaching your finished master piece. It is recommended that you get in touch with your language team’s coordinator first to make sure nobody else is already working on the same application.

Now comes the best part: testing your work! Note that empathy is only partially translated in the screenshot below (check out the button):

One of the benefits of using poEdit for your translations (some people like to use a combination of poEdit and a text editor, like vim… that would be me!) is that it automatically checks the file for formatting issues AND generates a compiled version of your translations. It is this compiled version, a file that ends with the extension .mo, that gets used at runtime by your application in order to display its messages in the chosen language.

What we need to do is make a backup copy of the original compiled file and substitute it with your brand new translation:

cp /usr/share/locale/pt_BR/LC_MESSAGES/empathy.mo $HOME/original_empathy.mo cp empathy.mo /usr/share/locale/pt_BR/LC_MESSAGES/empathy.mo

Now restart the application, and… voilá:

Now, remember that bug report (here’s mine) you’ve filed before? Well, once someone from your language team reviews it and commits it, it is only a matter of waiting for conary (the packaging management system behind the Developer Kit) to notify you when the new version is available for update. Below is the screenshot of my system running a vanilla GNOME in Brazilian Portuguese:

Got any questions? Feel free to drop me a line.