Introduction

MonoDevelop has chosen to use gettext instead of resources for translating into other languages. This allows us to take advantage of GNOME translators familiarity with gettext and other advantages.

Developers

Instead of using a string directly in your code, you just need to pass it to gettext which returns the translated string to you.

  1. Remember to encase all user visible strings, like so:
    GettextCatalog.GetString ("user visible string")
    String.Format (GettextCatalog.GetString ("user visible string {0}"), variable)
  2. Add files with these strings to MonoDevelop/po/POTFILES.in
FIXME add info about checking for missing files in POTFILES.in glade, xml files

Translators

See Gnome I18N for information about the GNOME translation project. Much of that material will also apply here. In particular:

    //FIXME how do you do this:
  1. Create xx_XX.po (based on you Language code)
  2. Translate the strings
  3. add your language code to ALL_LINGUAS in configure.in
  4. test by running LANG=xx_XX monodevelop

Credits, License, Errata

Send comments to jluke@cfl.rr.com or the monodevelop mailing list.

Licensed under the MIT License

Last updated April 14, 2004