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Localizing Mozilla Thunderbird
Using Mozilla Firefox POT/PO files
This section outlines few steps that can make localizing Mozilla
Thunderbird e-mail client somewhat easier and faster. This
only makes sense if you already have a localized version of Mozilla
Firefox.
In short, a faster translation process is possible because Mozilla
Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird share some of the files that need to be
translated, and thus a translator can reuse part of the work that is
already done in the localized Firefox.
Firefox and Thunderbird are developed to share the 'toolkit' folder. If
you've done some l10n work on Firefox than you probably know that the
files needed for a l10n build are separated in two folders: 'browser'
and 'toolkit'.
Firefox's toolkit folder contains the following folders:
autoconfig/ global/ global-platform/ global-region/ mozapps/ necko/
passwordmgr/ pipnss/ pippki/
and at this stage with little or no effort you can reuse everything
exept 'autoconfig' and 'passwordmgr'.
A step-by-step guide (on GNU/Linux)
bash$ cp /some-path/thunderbird/chrome/en-US-mail.jar tb-l10n/
(Copy the jar file to favored localization folder.)
bash$ cd tb-l10n/
bash$ unzip en-US-mail.jar
(Unpack the jar file. The result is a 'locale' folder.)
bash$ moz2po -P --progress=verbose -i locale/ -o locale-pot/
(Convert to POT templates.)
bash$ cd locale-pot/
bash$ rm -r pippki pipnss necko global-region
(These are equal with Firefox ones.)
bash$ mv mozapps mozapps-tb
bash$ mv global global-tb
bash$ mv global-platform global-platform-tb
(Just to be on the safe side here. Some files form these folders are
needed. This may seem like an redundant step, because you can simply
enter these folder and delete everything but the needed file. :) )
bash$ mkdir -p mozapps global global-platform/win
bash$ cp mozapps-tb/pref-downloads.dtd.pot mozapps/
bash$ cp global-tb/brand.* global/
bash$ cp global-tb/brand.* global/
bash$ cp global-tb/charset.dtd.pot global/
bash$ cp global-platform-tb/win/nsWindowsHooks.properties.pot global-platform/win/
(Copying the few files that are different. And now you can delete those
'-tb' folders.)
bash$ mv en-US/* .
(Moving files form en-US to current directory. Don't know if this is
really needed. I just recreated the directory structure from the Russian
XPI.)
These are the files that await your translating skills so you can now start your favorite PO editor.
If you want to have all the files in one place you can copy the missing
po and pot file from Firefox (just don't overwrite the few previously
selected files).
When your translation is finished is back to po2moz, and building a XPI
(you can use some other Thunderbird language pack XPI as a template for your own).
Aditional Migration
You can also now make use of pomigrate and friends. These are bash scripts that wrap the
Gettext tools. They can often increase the level of translationa as they will apply a translation
compendium to your files.