a README for the translation process

README.translate

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+Friendica translations
+======================
+
+Translation Process
+-------------------
+
+The strings used in the UI of Friendica is translated at Transifex [1] and then
+included in the git repository at github. If you want to help with translation
+for any language, be it correcting terms or translating friendica to a
+currently not supported language, please register an account at transifex.com
+and contact the friendica translation team there.
+
+Translating friendica is simple. Just use the online tool at transifex. If you
+don't want to deal with git & co. that is fine, we check the status of the
+translations regularly and import them into the source tree at github so that
+others can use them.
+
+We do not include every translation from transifex in the source tree to avoid
+a scattered and disturbed overall experience. As an uneducated guess we have a
+lower limit of 50% translated strings before we include the language. This
+limit is judging only by the amount of translated strings under the assumption
+that the most prominent strings for the UI will be translated first by a
+translation team. If you feel your translation useable before this limit,
+please contact us and we will probably include your teams work in the source
+tree.
+
+If you want to get your work into the source tree yourself, feel free to do so
+and contact us with and question that arises. The process is simple and
+friendica ships with all the tools necessary.
+
+The location of the translated files in the source tree is
+    /view/LNG-CODE/
+where LNG-CODE is the language code used, e.g. de for German or fr for French.
+For the email templates (the *.tpl files) just place them into the directory
+and you are done. The translated strings come as a "message.po" file from
+transifex which needs to be translated into the PHP file friendica uses.  To do
+so, place the file in the directory mentioned above and use the "po2php"
+utility from the util directory of your friendica installation.
+
+Assuming you want to convert the German localization which is placed in
+view/de/message.po you would do the following.
+
+    1. Navigate at the command prompt to the base directory of your
+       friendica installation
+
+    2. Execute the po2php script, which will place the translation
+       in the strings.php file that is used by friendica.
+
+       $> php util/po2php.php view/de/message.po
+
+       The output of the script will be placed at view/de/strings.php where
+       froemdoca os expecting it, so you can test your translation mmediately.
+                                  
+    3. Visit your friendica page to check if it still works in the language you
+       just translated. If not try to find the error, most likely PHP will give
+       you a hint in the log/warnings.about the error.
+                                        
+       For debugging you can also try to "run" the file with PHP. This should
+       not give any output if the file is ok but might give a hint for
+       searching the bug in the file.
+
+       $> php view/de/strings.php
+
+    4. commit the two files with a meaningful commit message to your git
+       repository, push it to your fork of the friendica repository at github and
+       issue a pull request for that commit.
+
+Utilities
+---------
+
+Additional to the po2php script there are some more utilities for translation
+in the "util" directory of the friendica source tree.  If you only want to
+translate friendica into another language you wont need any of these tools most
+likely but it gives you an idea how the translation process of friendica
+works.
+
+For further information see the utils/README file.
+
+Known Problems
+--------------
+
+Friendica uses the language setting of the visitors browser to determain the
+language for the UI. Most of the time this works, but there are some known
+quirks.
+
+One is that some browsers, like Safari, do the setting to "de-de" but friendica
+only has a "de" localisation.  A workaround would be to add a symbolic link
+from
+    $friendica/view/de-de
+pointing to
+    $friendica/view/de
+
+Links
+-----
+
+[1]   https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/friendica/
+