4.5 Useful Hints for Editing PO Files

This section contains additional explanations, some in the form of advice and recommendations; not all of them are strictly related to PO files editing.

• When you install a new translation of an article (that is different from a server template), all you need to do is to add your PO file in the appropriate /po sub-directory.

  In the next build, your article.lang.html will be built and the link to it will be added to the list of translations and propagate to all translations, provided that they are under GNUN’s control.

• If you don’t feel comfortable editing gnun.mk, do not worry. Someone from the GNUN maintainers will notice and will amend TEMPLATE_LINGUAS for you, as appropriate.
• Dealing with obsolete strings. Elements which are removed from the original articles appear in the PO files as “obsolete” strings—the translation is not lost, but they are marked in a special way at the end of the PO file. You don’t have to update a PO file if it contains obsolete strings—do this only if it has “fuzzy” or “untranslated”, and of course when you want to improve the existing translated ones. Sometimes these obsolete strings are useful, and they can save time. For example, if you anticipate that the deleted text may reappear some time in the future, you can preserve the string and hopefully it would be marked as “fuzzy” when this happens. Failing that, you can still copy it and yank it at the appropriate place.
• You can add comments to every message in a PO file—for example if you want to remember that you have to do something, or to remind you why this particular message is translated in a special way. These comments do not appear in the generated HTML source.
• Sometimes, especially when the original message contains many links, it is easier to copy it to msgstr and edit the latter by translating the English text. In PO mode of Emacs, this is done by C-j. This is useful also for large chunks of text in <pre> elements, which normally you would want to preserve verbatim.
• Do not use HTML entities for non-ASCII letters as in the English original. They are harder to type and read. So, if there is ‘ü’ and this is a character from the alphabet of your language, just write it as ‘ü’ directly.
• Wrapping of msgstr using M-q in Emacs (or other means) is considered harmful. It is best to leave GNUN (or more precisely, Po4a) do the wrapping—that way all generated HTML translations will have predictable results. This will help tremendously for the conversion to other formats, like Texinfo. Also, note that not all elements are wrapped by default, so deliberately wrapping the text inside the msgstr could lead to an invalid page or a page that is valid, but is rendered incorrectly by the web browser.