This file contains some important hints for translators. The current status of the GIMP translation can be checked at http://l10n.gnome.org/module/gimp Translation of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is handled by the GNOME Translation Project (see http://l10n.gnome.org/). If you want to help, we suggest that you get in touch with the translation team of your language (see http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/). GIMP is different GIMP is a complex application which has a bunch of scripts and plug-ins that all want to be internationalized. Therefore there is not one catalog but many. For a full translation of GIMP's UI, you will have to add translations for the following catalogs: po/gimp20.po -- the core po-libgimp/gimp20-libgimp.pot -- the libgimp library po-plugins/gimp20-std-plugins.pot -- the C plug-ins po-python/gimp20-python.pot -- the pygimp plug-ins po-script-fu/gimp20-script-fu.pot -- the script-fu scripts po-tips/gimp20-tips.pot -- the startup tips If you are looking for the translations of gimp-perl, please note that gimp-perl has been moved into it's own git module called gimp-perl. GIMP Tips dialog In addition to message catalogs GIMP provides a file with tips that are displayed in the Tips dialog. This file is in XML format and can be found in the tips directory. The english tips messages are extracted from gimp-tips.xml.in so translators can use the usual tools to create a .po file that holds the translations. All translations are then merged into gimp-tips.xml with language identifiers taken from the po filename. GIMP needs to know what language it should select from gimp-tips.xml. Therefore, there's the special message "tips-locale:C" in the main message catalog that needs to be translated correctly. For a german translation of the tips this would look like this: #: ../app/dialogs/tips-parser.c:188 msgid "tips-locale:C" msgstr "tips-locale:de" Localization of third-party plug-ins Third-party plug-ins (plug-ins that are not distributed with GIMP) can't have their messages in the gimp-std-plugins textdomain. We have therefore provided a mechanism that allows plug-ins to install their own message catalogs and tell GIMP to bind to that textdomain. This is necessary so that GIMP can correctly translate the menu paths the plug-in registers. Basically the plug-in has to call gimp_plugin_domain_add() or gimp_domain_plugin_add_with_path() before it registers any functions. Have a look at the script-fu plug-in to see how this is done in detail.