Translation guidelines for PGP

If you want to translate PGP 2.6.3i into a foreign language, please follow these guidelines:

  1. Make sure that a translation is not already available. There's no need to duplicate work! If you decide to go on with the translation, please contact me so I can update the status for your language to "translation in progress".

  2. Download this template file. (This is actually the Norwegian translation, but it serves the purpose.)

  3. Replace all occurences of "no:" with the two-letter code for your country/language.

  4. Translate all the text strings. (There are 371 all together!) Don't do it all in one day, you will only end up exhausting yourself! :-)

  5. Be very careful with your spelling! Try to find the right words, be consistent, and maybe use a dictionary to find the equivalents for hard-to-translate English cryptography terms.

  6. Note that most Europen languages use the Latin/1 (ISO 8859/1) character set. Please stick to this standard!

  7. Remember to translate the help file, too! The help file should be called XX.HLP, where XX is the language code. Use the English PGP.HLP or EN.HLP provided with PGP 2.6.3i as your template.

  8. Don't make the language file publicly available at once! Try using it for a while, correct any errors and see if your initial translations really describe what PGP is doing. (Especially the error messages can be hard to translate sometimes.) It could also be a good idea to have a few "beta testers" look at your work and give you their comments.

  9. When the translation has been in use for a while and you are satisfied with it, pack the LANGUAGE.TXT and XX.HLP files in a ZIP file and upload it to an FTP site or make it publicly available in some other way.

  10. Send me a mail, so I can add it to this list of available languages.
Thank you for your help!

Last updated February, 5 1997 by Stσle Schumacher <stale@hypnotech.com>