Examples

Example of Starting a Translation

French will be used for the example:

   cvs checkout webwml/Makefile.common webwml/english
   cd webwml
   mkdir french
   cvs add french
   cd french
   cp ../english/.wmlrc ../english/Make.* .
   echo 'include $(subst webwml/french,webwml/english,$(CURDIR))/Makefile' > Makefile
   mkdir po
   cvs add Make* .wmlrc po
   cp Makefile po
   make -C po init-po
   cvs add po/Makefile po/*.fr.po

Edit the .wmlrc file and change:

'-D CUR_LANG=English' to '-D CUR_LANG=French'
'-D CUR_ISO_LANG=en' to '-D CUR_ISO_LANG=fr'
'-D CUR_LOCALE=en_US' to '-D CUR_LOCALE=fr_FR'
'-D CHARSET=iso-8859-1' to whatever is appropriate.
French just happens to use the same character encoding as English so no change is necessary, however it's likely that new languages will need to have this setting adjusted.

Edit Make.lang and change 'LANGUAGE := en' to 'LANGUAGE := fr'. In case you are translating to a language which uses a multi-byte charset, you may have to change some other variables in that file, for more information read ../Makefile.common and perhaps other working examples (translations such as Chinese).

Go to french/po and translate entries in PO files. This should be quite straightforward.

Always make sure you copy the Makefile to each directory you translate. This is necessary because the program make is used to convert the .wml files into HTML, and make uses Makefiles.

When you are done adding and editing pages, do a

   cvs commit

from the webwml directory. You can now start translating the pages.

Example of Translating a Page

A French translation of the social contract will be used for the example:

   cd webwml
   ./copypage.pl english/social_contract.wml
   cd french
   cvs add social_contract.wml

This will automatically add the translation-check header, pointing to the version of the original file which was copied. It also creates the destination directory and Makefile, if missing.

Edit social_contract.wml and translate the text. Do not try to translate any links or change them in any way - if you want to change anything, request it on the debian-www list. When done, type

   cvs commit -m "short description of the changes you made" social_contract.wml

Example of Adding a New Directory

This example shows the French translation adding the intro/ directory:

   cd webwml/french
   mkdir intro
   cvs add intro
   cd intro
   cp ../Makefile .

Make sure a new directory has the Makefile and that it's committed in CVS. Otherwise, running make will give an error to everyone else trying it.

   cvs add Makefile
   cd ..
   cvs commit -m "added the intro dir to CVS" intro