Note for translators of the pot files: ====================================== Make a copy of the pot file renaming it to reflect the language it is being translated in to. For example, for a German translation of emc2.pot, your working file would be de.po - If the file does not exist within the source repository, then create one from the emc2.pot template: cp emc2.pot de.pot To update a language's .po file from its .pot file, use the "msgmerge" command. Because doing this needlessly creates lots of uneeded revisions of the .po files in the history, and because different translators have preferences about msgmerge flags (particularly --width, --no-wrap, and --no-fuzzy-matching), this is not done automatically by the "make" process. The simplest "msgmerge" commandline is: msgmerge -U xx.po emc2.pot When you are done, "git commit" the new .po file. If you have push access, "git push". Otherwise, format your changes as a patch with "git format-patch" and send it to the emc-developers mailing list. Graphical tools for editing .po files ===================================== On Dapper there seem to be two graphical front-ends for editing .po files: gtranslator (a part of the Gnome desktop) and kbabel (part of KDE). Required versions of xgettext and msgmerge ========================================== Configure tries to detect several problems with xgettext and msgmerge. Version 0.14.5 is known to work properly.