RSVPMaker finally has its first international translation, thanks to some help from Jarosław Żeliński, a consultant who has been working with the plugin. Here is what the editing panel for setting dates and RSVP parameters looks like in Polish:
Note that there are a couple of English language phrases showing through where no translation has yet been supplied. I actually just got received an updated version, which will be included with the next RSVPMaker release.
I’ve been getting interest in translation and occasional offers to help since RSVPMaker was first released, but Mr. Żeliński helped me work through a series of issues ranging from proper encoding of international characters to bugs in the code that was supposed to load the translation files. Now that we’ve got this first one, it would be good to see translations to some other languages.
I’m still new to this whole process, but here’s essentially how it works:
- Obtain a copy of POEdit the utility used to generate translation files in a standard format.
- Use POEdit to open the rsvpmaker.pot file, which is a template for the catalog of translated phrases you will create from English to the target language.
- Save your file as rsvpmaker-locale.po where locale is a standard country code. Example: rsvpmaker-pl_PL.po for Polish. See http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language
- Use POEdit to suggest translated phrases to be used in place of my English language ones. For content to be available for translation, it needs to be marked correctly in the plugin source code, so let me know if you see important omissions. I’ve tried to flag most of the labels and instructions for translation.
- When you save your work, POEdit will also generate a .mo file such as rsvpmaker-pl_PL.mo. You can upload this to your own server to test that it works, with the language code set in the WordPress wp-config.php file. If you believe you have created a translation others would find useful, send me the .mo file to include in future distributions of RSVPMaker.
- When I put out a new release, you should be able to use the Update from Sources function in POEdit to detect if there are new words or phrases available for translation. Send me the updated .mo files as appropriate.
For a general tutorial on translating plugins, see http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/translating-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/
If the instructions I’ve supplied aren’t clear, let me know how I can improve them. Thanks.