A few questions about translating PO file

I have a few questions about translating PO file:

Assume I copied ikiwiki.pot file to pl.po file and translated it from English to Polish. How can I check that my pl.po file works good? I have some experience with building Debian packages, but I don't know too much about working with PO files in Debian packages.

Try putting it into the po/ directory and running make and make install in there, that should create the .mo and install it somewhere appropriate. ikiwiki should display translated messages when building the wiki (with -v).
I'll send you my translation when I finish it, of course. But what about updating my PO file? Should I send it to you for every ikiwiki issue? Maybe you should give write access to ikiwiki repository for translators of PO files?

I recently set up a git repository mirroring the main svn repository (see download) and one idea is that perhaps translators can use that for a distributed revision control system that I can merge back from into svn. I can set up accounts for svn, but as it's on my own personal server and not a sourceforge/alioth like thing, it's a bit of a pain and maintenance burden for me.

OK, I've picked up Subversion for your ikiwiki, so I can get into Git now
What is the best way to update my PO file when you do some changes in ikiwiki.pot file? Should I translate my PO file from scratch or can I do diff for old and new ikiwiki.pot file and update only differences?

There are standard tools for working with po files, and the po file should be updated as part of the wiki build process so that any fuzzy strings are so marked.

Could you please point me any good references or write a quick start for translators? I think it can be very useful for me and other people.

I'm not a translator, so I don't really know..

OK, I hope I handle it
What about "gettexting" button titles and link names? Do you really think that there should be hardcoded in ikiwiki templates? --Paweł

I don't know, really. Recai's approach seems to show promise.

BTW, why does ikiwiki number my questions wrongly (1., 1., 1., 1., instead of 1., 2., 3., 4.)? Where have I made a Markdown mistake? --Paweł

My indentation mistake, I think. --Joey

Now it's perfect Thank you very much! --Paweł

Less laconic gettext messages

I'm just translating ikiwiki.pot file to Polish and I have problems with some gettext messages, because unfortunately there are very laconic, for example "update of %s's %s by %s".

Sometimes I don't understand background well, because I don't use all ikiwiki plugins and I have to check ikiwiki source code. Besides in Polish language we have conjugation of a verb and I can't do it correctly if I don't know what subject of a message is. Then I have to check the sources again...

So I have a request to Joey and the rest of ikiwiki coders: please write more verbose gettext messages and don't fear using subject there. It will be huge help for me and other ikiwiki translators. Thank you! --Paweł

Well, those messages are mostly laconic because they're output by ikiwiki running in unix program mode and other tight situations, and it should be clear from context when you see the expanded message what the various bits are.

For example, "update of foowiki's MooBar by joey" seems to say enough to be clear (and fit in mutt's subject line display), while the corresponding "actualizado el wiki foowiki y la página MooBar por el usuario joey" feels a bit verbose. (And should it say "updated foowiki and the MooBar page" like that? My Spanish sucks though..) In my crappy Spanish I might instead say something like "actualizado MooBar de foowiki por joey". Or maybe "actualizado página Moobar por joey"?

But you know that "update of %s's %s by %s" string can be "update of foowiki's MooBar by joey", but I can only guess it

Anyway, to get back to your point, it's true that translators often need additonal context about things like what variables expand to, and size limits. This is generally done by adding comments in the pot file, and I've turned that on, and added a few. --Joey

Thank you very much! It also will be a big help for me. --Paweł