===============================================================================
 Translating Mail Notification
===============================================================================

Index

	0. About this document
	1. Correctness
	2. Starting up
	3. Comments
	4. Formatting
	5. Capitalization
	6. Context
	7. Access keys
	8. Application name

0. About this document

	$Id: TRANSLATING,v 1.7 2008-01-04 15:38:21 jylefort Exp $

	Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Jean-Yves Lefort.

	Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
	document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
	(GFDL), Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free
	Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover
	Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. You can find a copy of the
	GFDL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html or in the file
	COPYING-DOCS distributed with this manual.

1. Correctness

	To translate Mail Notification, you should have a good
	understanding of the English language, and excellent writing
	skills in the target language. Grammatical, spelling and
	semantic errors should be avoided as much as possible.

2. Starting up

	To generate a new .po template, type the following commands:

		cd po
		intltool-update -p
		msginit -l LL_CC

	LL must be a language code, and CC must be a country code, for
	instance:

		msginit -l it_IT

	Consult the gettext and intltool documentation for more
	informations.

3. Comments

	Translator hints are prefixed with "translators:". Other
	comments must be ignored (the extraction tools blindly copy
	source code comments which precede translatable messages).

4. Formatting

	Newlines (\n) must be preserved. Formatting elements must be
	copied literally, but their content must be translated. For
	instance, the message:

		<span weight="bold">Fonts</span>

	translates to French as:

		<span weight="bold">Polices de caractères</span>

5. Capitalization

	Mail Notification follows the GNOME capitalization guidelines:

		http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-text-labels.html#layout-capitalization

	Messages which use header capitalization are marked with the
	comment "translators: header capitalization". The header
	capitalization rule of the target language, if any, must be
	applied to these messages.

6. Context

	Some messages are prefixed with context information (separated
	from the actual message by the pipe character, "|"), for
	instance:

		msgid "icon tooltip's mail summary layout|Co_mpact"

	The purpose of the context information is to allow different
	translations of the same English message. The context must be
	removed from the translations, as in:

		msgid "icon tooltip's mail summary layout|Co_mpact"
		msgstr "_Compact"

		msgid "popup's mail summary layout|Co_mpact"
		msgstr "_Compacte"

7. Access keys

	Characters following an underline are access keys. The user
	can activate the control labelled by the message by pressing
	Alt-x, where x is the character following the underline.

	When a message contains an access key, assign an appropriate
	access key to the translation by consulting the "Choosing
	Access Keys" section of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines:

		http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html#choosing-access-keys

8. Application name

	The application name ("Mail Notification") should be
	translated. For historical reasons, in English, it is treated
	as a proper noun and capitalized accordingly. However, in the
	target language, it should be translated as a common noun
	(such as "the washing machine" or "the mail notifier").
