This file should give you some basic information
to start on a new translation for monotone.

You should meet the following prerequisites:

a) You've pulled and checked out net.venge.monotone
b) You have a text editor with UTF-8 support
c) You can deal with the shell...

Now the step-by-step HOWTO:

I) Edit the file po/LINGUAS a new entry for your language.
   The language code has the format ISO 639-1 (e.g. "en" 
   for English, "de" for German, aso.) - if your language 
   differs by region, you can also expand the language code 
   with the country code to reflect these differences. 
   F.e. "en_GB" stands for English as spoken (and written) 
   in Great Britain (BE), while "en_US" determines 
   American English (AE).

II) Configure monotone
  
   $ cd net.venge.monotone
   $ aclocal && autoreconf --install 
   $ ./configure
   $ ( cd po; make monotone.pot-update )
   
   This will create an untranslated monotone.pot file in po/.
   Copy this file to <yourlang>.po (where <yourlang> is the
   language code you've entered in LINGUAS), and continue 
   with III).
    
III) Edit the header of your new language po according to
   the excellent HOWTO here [0]. Of particular interest
   are mainly two things:
     
   a) The encoding of the file (Content-Type: ...)
      Set this to the encoding you'll use in your text
      editor to translate the file. UTF-8 is recommended
      here.
   b) The Plural forms configuration (Plural-Forms: ...)
      The Entries here differ from language to language,
      some might have more complex plural forms (e.g.
      Slavic languages), others have simple ones (e.g.
      most Romanian languages). If you don't know exactly
      what to write here, take a look at the gettext manual
      here [1].

IV) Start translating the entries. If you like to update your
    *.po file, trigger the following command (here for the
    German translation):
	
    $ cd po
    $ make monotone.pot-update && make MSGMERGE=msgmerge de.po-update

    To check if new or fuzzy strings have arrived, use msgfmt:

    $ msgfmt -cv po/de.po


Thats it basically. If you're looking for a nice GUI to edit
language files, I can recommend KBabel[2], which comes with the kdesdk 
module of KDE, or poedit[3].

[0] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2004-July/msg00073.html
[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_150.html
[2] http://kbabel.kde.org/
[3] http://www.poedit.net
