I Want to Help Translate

We prefer to have a specific person or group of people maintain the translation for a particular language. If Pidgin already has a translation for the language you want to help with, please contact the translator for that language and ask if there's anything you can do. It's possible they're looking for someone to take over. You can find their email address in Pidgin's About window.

I Want to Translate to a New Language

Great! We love translations! First you should look at the current translation statistics at ​http://developer.pidgin.im/l10n/. There you can see if there is already a translation for your language and whether this translation is complete and actively maintained. If there is already a translation, you can find the translator's name in the header of the .po file for your language.

The second thing you should do is join the ​translators mailing list and ask if anyone is already working on translating that language. If there is already a translation which is not actively maintained, you can also offer your help.

When should I submit a translation update?

The translations are shipped with each Pidgin release, so there is no great advantage to submitting a translation multiple times during a release cycle. We announce a string freeze on the ​translators mailing list about 4 days before each release. This is a promise to you that we will not add any new strings or change any existing ones. During this time you should finish translating any new strings and submit a new translation to us.

Where should I submit a translation update?

Please ​create a new ticket and attach your translation file. Also, please provide your full name, a contact email address, and the language and country code for your translation.

You should remove location information from the update when submitting a ticket or committing directly to monotone. You can do this using intltool-update as follows:

XGETTEXT_ARGS=--no-location intltool-update LL

where LL is your language code.

Translation Stats and a .pot File

You can see the current translation statistics at ​http://developer.pidgin.im/l10n/. There is also a link to the nightly version of the pidgin.pot at the bottom of the page. In addition to the traditional pidgin.pot file, we also translate the strings used by the Windows installer. These strings are in the english.nsh file in our repository, and should be translated by providing a <lanuage>.nsh file containing the translated strings.