Translating Chyrp

One of many neat Chyrp features is internationalization (i18n). English is the default language of this awesome blogging tool, but it can be translated to any language, if there's a translation file to be found.

Many Chyrp users recently hopped in, volunteering to translate Chyrp into their own native language, which I think it's excellent and very valuable help. Nevertheless, some asked which is the decent translating procedure, although there is none really. On behalf of that, I will briefly show the one required tool for translating .po files, compiling them to .mo format, and how easily it is to teach Chyrp speak another language.

h3. All you need is Poedit "!http://xhezairi.com/uploads/po_edit_thumb.png(PO Edit)!(PO File Editor)":http://www.poedit.net/

bq. Poedit is cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. It is built with wxWidgets toolkit and can run on any platform supported by it (although it was only tested on Unix with GTK+ and Windows). It aims to provide more convenient approach to editing catalogs than launching vi and editing the file by hand.

As you can see, Poedit can't be any simple than that, one window app and self-explanatory. There is one single rule to obey however, don't change the original strings. They serve as IDs by which Chyrp figures out which line to replace with the translated string, so keep that in mind. Depending on your Poedit preferences, every time you save the changes to the Chyrp .po file, there is an extra .mo file created, and that is what Chyrp uses to speak your language. Everything else is plain easy.

h3. Beginning and completing the translation

Chyrp comes with .pot catalog files. You're going to have to harness Poedit to turn those into .po files. Fire up Poedit and go to File > New catalog from POT file, select one of the files you want to start with.

In the next dialog window fill in the fields with your information as the author of the file being translated. After that, jump from one line to another and complete the translation fields with the relevant meaning.

One last thing though, remember to maintain the proper directory structure of the translated files. It is also a good practice to include both .po and .mo files in case there's a mistakenly translated line and someone spots it and wants to help out to further improve it.

Below is the directory structure of my Albanian translation of Chyrp.

feathers
  audio - locale - sq_Al.mo
  chat  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  link  - locale - sq_Al.mo
  photo - locale - sq_AL.mo
  quote - locale - sq_AL.mo
  text  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  video - locale - sq_AL.mo
includes 
  locale
    sq_AL.mo
modules
  aggregator  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  cacher      - locale - sq_AL.mo
  comments    - locale - sq_AL.mo
  markdown    - locale - sq_AL.mo
  paging      - locale - sq_AL.mo
  read_more   - locale - sq_AL.mo
  smartypants - locale - sq_AL.mo
  swfupload   - locale - sq_AL.mo
  tags        - locale - sq_AL.mo
  textilize   - locale - sq_AL.mo
themes
  stardust
    locale
      sq_AL.mo

Finally, compress the structure to .zip (more common than .rar) and "upload it":http://chyrp.net/extend/new_extension/translation/ under Chyrp.net | Extend > Translations page, in order for your fellow natives to download it and enjoy Chyrp in your own language.