Guidance for translators of Wolf's i18n elements.

Wolf CMS has been designed to make “internationalization” (i18n), that is, translation of its administration and plugins, as simple as possible.

The following guidance and suggested procedures should help those who wish to (a) translate Wolf into their own language, and (b) share their work with the wider Wolf CMS community.

• Consult the i18n source directory to see whether the translation exists! (So you can fix or complete an existing translation)
• Check the translation adoptees list to see if the translation was already adopted by a maintainer. If your language has not yet been “adopted”, consider taking on this important role yourself, following the guidelines here.
• Always ensure you are working with the most recent stable Wolf version.
• Consider translating the i18n files for the core plugins.
• Of course, make sure you use the correct ISO 639-1 two-chacacter code for your particular language: from Wikipedia or the official list.

Wolf's admin includes a translation template generator to help out translators with translating the Wolf core and plugins. Go to the Administration > Settings tab in Wolf's backend:

Clicking on the “translate Wolf” link (circled in red in the image above) will take you to a page with complete instructions for doing your translation, as well as links which will generate the template files both for the Wolf core as well as for those plugins which have i18n implemented.

Once you have finished your translation, then we suggest you:

1. Announce your work in the Translation section of the Wolf forums.
2. Visit Wolf's Google Code issue tracker, and enter your translation work as an “issue” (enhancement).
3. Post your XX-message.php files to the Translation section of the Wolf forums.

Everyone using Wolf CMS is grateful for the i18n modules contributed by users. The more widely used Wolf is, the larger the community will be. And that's good for everyone!

So thank you for your contribution, and please consider keeping your work up-to-date as Wolf continues to develop. You might find a 'diff' tool useful for this task…

Since Wolf generates empty translation templates for you, and you always have the most recent translation available from Wolf's SVN, you can use tools like diff or beyondCompare, or the compare plugin for Notepad++ to compare the old translation file with the new template.

Here's a rough guideline:

1. Check out the latest Wolf version from the GitHub repository
2. Generate a new translation template through Wolf's interface (see screen capture above, or direct url example: http://localhost/wolf/admin/translate).
3. Use diff or a tool like beyondCompare to copy the old translation's entries into the new template

Your diff tool should highlight any changes between the two files. Be sure to only change entries on the right side of the equals sign ('='). If your diff tool highlights any changes on the left side of the equals sign, that means Wolf has changed the original text. In that case, be sure to double check your translation for that entry.

When you're done, compare your new/updated translation file to a freshly (!) generated translation file with your diff tool. There should be no differences on the left side of the equals ('=') sign.