doc/translation.mdwn



If you want to translate your wiki into another language, there are
essentially three pieces needed for a complete translation:


The messages in the ikiwiki program itself need to be translated.
Ikiwiki is internationalised, and most such messages are already marked
with gettext(). The source tarball includes a po/ikiwiki.pot
that can be copied and translated as a po file. All very standard.
Note that a few things in the source are not currently translated. These
include:

Error messages of the "should never happen" variety.
Certian info in commit messages, which is not visible from inside the
wiki, but is visible in the commit logs. This needs to stay in English
so that ikiwiki can parse it back out of the logs.
Some parts of FormBuilder forms, which should be translatable by
adding templates. Note that these forms don't need templates for the
English version.
The name of the index page, which has a special meaning to browsers
anyway.
The names of some other pages, like sidebar and openid.
The names and values of parameters, both to the program, in the setup
file, and in preprocessor directives.


The [[basewiki]] needs to be translated. The
[[plugins/po]] ikiwiki plugin will allow translating
wikis using po files and can be used for this.
There is now a website, l10n.ikiwiki.info
that both demos the translated basewiki, and allows easy translation of
it.
To generate the po and pot files for translating the basewiki,
get ikiwiki's source, edit the po/underlay.setup file,
adding your language. Then run 'make -C po underlays. This will generate many po files under po/underlays. The first ones you'll want to translate are in the po/underlays/basewikidirectory, which is really not very large, just a few thousand words. After that is done, you can tackle those underpo/underlays/directives`, which are a much larger (tens of
thousands of words).


The templates also need to be translated. Some work has been done on an
infrastructure for maintaining translated templates, as documented in
[[todo/l10n]], but until that's complete, you'd need to copy and
translate the templates by hand.