From B2evolution

This page is about updating an existing translation. If you are new to creating translations, please read the Localization page first.

So you have installed an existing language pack or you have made one yourself. Good. However, as new versions come out, new strings are added to b2evolution and, unless someone else is doing it, you'll need to update the translations in your messages.PO file accordingly.

Or maybe you could only find a language pack for an older version of b2evolution and installed that one. Now you'll need to add the missing translations to the .PO file in the language pack in order to make it complete for the newer versions of b2evo.

The latest up-to-date strings are always available in the /locales/messages.POT file that comes with the latest version.

The latest .POT file can easily be merged into your already translated .PO file, so you'll only have to translate what has changed since last time you worked on the .PO.

To update your .PO file with the latest .POT: open your old .PO file in POedit, go to the "Catalog" menu and select "Update from POT file...", finally select the latest .POT file and voilà!

When merging, the gettext utilities/tools will try to find approximative translations for each new string based on existing translations you made in previous updates. These approximations often make no sense at all... and some languages are more sensitive to this than others.

All automatic/approximative translations are also automatically marked as fuzzy so you know you have to review them (In PO edit they appear in Yellow). This also means it is not recommended to use the fuzzy state for anything other than identifying automatic translations.

Finally, be assured that these automatic translations do not degrade your work in any way. Already translated strings are never modified automatically and automated translations of new strings never appear in the application until you validate them! As a matter of fact, b2evolution does not use the .PO files directly. These files need to go through a process of extractipoura PO file whenever you feel it's ready.

Once again, I suggest you do not leave anything fuzzy in the files before extracting. If you're unsure of something, just leave it untranslated (empty string -- blue) rather than marked fuzzy (yellow). (Note: I've recently changed the gettext/xg.php script to not extract fuzzy strings into _global.php Blueyed)