   =========================================================
   ||       Translation guidelines for Media Mate.        ||
   ||              Author: Tony Collins                   ||
   ||          Updated by: Jamin Collins                  ||
   ||                   Draft 002                         ||
   ||              Firday, 12 Sep 2003                    ||
   =========================================================


 --------
 Overview
 --------
Media Mate is fully translatable.  These are the guidelines for translating it
into your language.


 --------
 Encoding
 --------
The web pages for Media Mate all use the UTF-8 encoding.  All of your
translated files must use the same encoding, or they will not display
correctly.


 ------------------
 Files to Translate
 ------------------
There are number of files to be translated, but there are only several hundred
strings in each file.  Many files have less strings.  There are
application-wide language files, and module specific language files.  The
application-wide files can be found in:

mediamate/lang/

The global English language file is named 'en.php'. Other files pertinant to
the application framework will be in subdirectories named 'en.directoryname'.
For example, there is a subdirectory called 'en.help'.

Modules also have a lang/ directory that contains 'en.php' and sometimes have
subdirectories.  At the very least, you must translate the global language
files and the Movies module.  We prefer you to translate all available modules.


 ------------------
 Naming conventions
 ------------------
The previous paragraph explains that the English translation is contained in
the file named 'en.php', and additional English translation files are stored in
subdirectories named 'en.dir'.

Your translation should start with your two letter country code, as with the
French translation - 'fr.php'.  The French translation help files are stored in
the 'fr.help' subdirectory.  Your translation must follow the same naming
conventions, or it will not work.

 ----------------
 How to translate
 ----------------
Copy mediamate/lang/en.php to mediamate/lang/XX.php, where XX is your two
letter country code.  If you open XX.php in your editor, you will see lines
similar to this:

'welcome'		=>	'Welcome to Media Mate',

The first part of the line ('welcome') is FIXED as a reference to the
application.  Do not alter it, or the arrow in the middle.  The part to
translate is the last part of the line ('Welcome to Media Mate').  Translate
the last part of each line to your native language, leaving all the apostrophes
and commas intact.  If you need to use an apostrophe in your translation, be
sure to escape it using a backslash before it.

Not all files have lines like the above.  For example, the help files are HTML
formatted plain text.  Translate them as they are, keeping the HTML formatting
code intact.

Copy all subdirectories prefixed with 'en' to new subdirectories prefixed by
your two letter country code, and translate all files within them.

 --------------------------
 Packaging your translation
 --------------------------
If you take the time to translate Media Mate into your language, we would
appreciate if you told us about it.  With your permission, we will then offer
it for download on the website.  When preparing your translation for
submission, you are to keep the same directory structures.  Your file and
directory structures might look something like this (using the French
translation for example):

lang/fr.php
lang/fr.help/adduser
lang/fr.help/edituser
lang/fr.help/options
modules/movies/lang/fr.php
modules/movies/lang/fr.lists/formats.php
modules/movies/lang/fr.lists/regions.php
modules/movies/lang/fr.lists/genres.php

This is so that a Media Mate user can simply uncompress your package into the
mediamate/ directory, and have your language pack work immediately.

Please package your translation in either ZIP format, or as a gzipped TAR file.
Let us know about your work by emailing MediaMate [at] Rocks [dot] cc.

Please attach your translation to a Feature Request on the Media Mate
bug/request tracker.
