PO files are plain text files that contains your translation, you can safely edit them by hand.
po minimalistic example (en_US/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po) :
msgid "" msgstr "" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" msgid "Simple test" msgstr "A small sentence in english"
Once edited, each PO file must be indexed using :
msgfmt mydomain.po -o mydomain.mo
This command won't work if you don't have gettext tools installed on your system. If you don't plan to use gettext support, you don't have to index po files.
This will produce a MO file (machine object) indexing your translation for quick access.
Then you have to translate this file in other languages.
po minimalistic example (fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po) :
msgid "" msgstr "" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: iso-8859-1\n" msgid "Simple test" msgstr "Une petite phrase en français"
As shown above, you must update the content type and the encoding to match your destination language.
The translation file must also be indexed :
msgfmt mydomain.po -o mydomain.mo