<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Davenport//DTD DocBook V3.0//EN" [
]>

<sect1 id="translating">
  <title>Translating Gnumeric</title>
    
    <para>
      There are a couple of things that should be kept in mind when
      translating Gnumeric.  Gnumeric, unlike regular applications
      includes strings used to render numbers in various ways: as
      dates, as times, as currency, number, as accounting-formatted
      numbers.  You should usually leave alone during the general
      language translation the number formatting and the date
      formatting codes.
    </para>
    
    <para>
      For example, in México, we speak spanish (language code "es"),
      so a spanish translation should be done for all of the messages
      in the program in the file es.po.
    </para>
    
    <para>
      Dates in México are represented as day/month/year.  The Gnumeric
      default is to follow the rules for the US, which are
      month/day/year.  Now, instead of adding those translations to
      the es.po file, those strings should be added to a per-country
      file, in this example the "es_MX.po" file.  Currency in México
      uses the same symbols, so those format codes are left untouched.
      Decimal point separator and thousand separators in Mexico are,
      again, the same as in the US, so they are left untouched.
    </para>
    
    <para>
      So, basically: when doing currency/date/number format
      translation, make sure no other country that uses your language
      has a different set of rules (when in doubt, just dont touch the
      formatting codes and add your localized version to the nn_MM.po
      file).
    </para>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="currency">
  <title>Dealing with currency formats</title>

    <para>
      Gnumeric uses the locale information to distinguish which
      character is used as a thousand separator and which one is used
      as a decimal separator.  On the number formatting strings, use
      your country decimal separator as the decimal separator.  For
      example, given the format in Gnumeric "#.00", French translators
      for France should change that to "#,00".  Thus, the default
      format "#,##0" (which means show at least one number, but
      separate the thousands with commas) should be translated in this
      case to "#.##0".
  </para>
</sect1>

    
