How to translate Bygfoot

You can contribute to our project greatly by translating the game to your language, thus helping those who don't speak English as well as you do. Here's a short guide on how to do it. You have to replace lang and COUNTRY with the short-cut of your language, e.g. de and DE for German, or hu and HU for Hungarian, pt and BR for Brazilian Portuguese.

1. Make sure there's nobody already working on the translation you want to begin (write me or post at the forums).

2. Make sure you have GNU gettext installed.

3. Download the current Bygfoot pot file from here). If you've already made a translation, go here and download the appropriate po file for your language and update it. The po files there are kept up-to-date.
   The following steps apply to people who do a first translation and not an update. To update your po file, go to the po/pot files page, get the appropriate po file and edit it with your preferred po file editor.

4. Generate a lang.po file from the pot file by calling msginit -l lang_COUNTRY -o lang.po -i bygfoot.pot.

5. Change the ''charset='' part in the header of the resulting lang.po file to ''charset=UTF-8''.

6. Read the notes on some translation issues. A lot of strings are also commented in the pot file.

7. Now you're ready to translate. You can do it with any UTF-8-capable text editor by editing the ''msgstr'' parts of the lang.po file (I use the po-mode of Emacs), or with a special tool like gtranslator. Make sure you use UTF-8 encoding; this way you can use any special characters your language contains.

8. Create a live game commentary file, either from scratch or by translating one of the existing files. See the howto. The existing files can be found here.

9. Create a news file, either from scratch or by translating one of the existing files. See the howto. The existing files can be found here.

10. Here's how to test your translation:
    1. get a CVS version of Bygfoot (e.g. using the bygfoot-update script)
    2. copy your po file to the po subdirectory of the build directory
    3. edit the configure.in file in the build dir: add lang to the list of languages in the line starting with ALL_LINGUAS
    4. run ./autogen.sh
    5. run make and make install
    6. test the game and your translation

11. After finishing the work on your files, please send it to gyboth_at_bygfoot_dot_com. Currently the game contains about 700 translatable strings. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or are not sure how to translate something. There's also a forum devoted to Bygfoot translations
    If you come across anything else you don't know how to translate, or if you'd like to contact the translator for a certain language, simply email me or post at the forum.