Auxiliary PO file
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Auxiliary PO file

This searching mode is based on matching the same original English string (the msgid) translated in some other language in an auxillary PO file. It is very common for Romance languages to have similar words, similarly for Anglo-Saxon and Slavic ones.

For example, say I wanted to translate the word “on”, from tdelibs.po, into Romanian but have no clue. I look in the same file for French and find actif, and in the Spanish one find activado. So, I conclude that the best one in Romanian will be active. (Of course, in English instead of “on” the word could have been “active” or “activated”, which would have made the translation process easier.) KBabel automates this task. Currently you can define only one auxiliary file to search.

Settings

You can configure this searching mode by selecting Settings->Configure Dictionary->PO Auxiliary from the KBabel menu.

In the Configure Dictionary PO Auxiliary dialog you can select the path to the auxiliary PO file. To automate PO-file switching when you change current edited file there are many variables delimited by @ char that are replaced by appropriate values:

@PACKAGE@

The name of application or package currently being translated. For example, it can expand to kbabel, tdelibs, konqueror and so on.

@LANG@

The language code. For example can expand to: de, ro, fr etc.

@DIRn@

where “n” is a positive integer. This expands to the “n”-th folder counted from the filename (right to left).

The edit line displays the actual path to the auxiliary PO file. While it is best to use the provided variables in a path it is possible to choose an absolute, real path to an existing PO file. Let's take an example.

I'm Romanian and I have some knowledge about French language and I work on KDE translation.

First step is to download a very fresh kde-l10n-fr.tar.bz2 from the KDE FTP site or to use the CVS system to put on my hard-disk a French translation tree. I do this into /home/clau/cvs-cvs.kde.org/kde-l10n/fr.

My PO sources folder is in /home/clau/cvs-cvs.kde.org/kde-l10n/ro. Do not forget to select PO Auxiliary as the default dictionary and check Automatically start search on the Search tab from KBabel's Preferences dialog.

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