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+Core GIT Translations
+=====================
+
+This directory holds the translations for the core of Git. This document
+describes how you can contribute to the effort of enhancing the language
+coverage and maintaining the translation.
+
+The localization (l10n) coordinator, Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com>,
+coordinates our localization effort in the l10 coordinator repository:
+
+        https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/
+
+The two character language translation codes are defined by ISO_639-1, as
+stated in the gettext(1) full manual, appendix A.1, Usual Language Codes.
+
+
+Contributing to an existing translation
+---------------------------------------
+As a contributor for a language XX, you should first check TEAMS file in
+this directory to see whether a dedicated repository for your language XX
+exists. Fork the dedicated repository and start to work if it exists.
+
+Sometime, contributors may find that the translations of their Git
+distributions are quite different with the translations of the
+corresponding version from Git official. This is because some Git
+distributions (such as from Ubuntu, etc.) have their own l10n workflow.
+For this case, wrong translations should be reported and fixed through
+their workflows.
+
+
+Creating a new language translation
+-----------------------------------
+If you are the first contributor for the language XX, please fork this
+repository, prepare and/or update the translated message file po/XX.po
+(described later), and ask the l10n coordinator to pull your work.
+
+If there are multiple contributors for the same language, please first
+coordinate among yourselves and nominate the team leader for your
+language, so that the l10n coordinator only needs to interact with one
+person per language.
+
+
+Translation Process Flow
+------------------------
+The overall data-flow looks like this:
+
+    +-------------------+            +------------------+
+    | Git source code   | ---(1)---> | L10n coordinator |
+    | repository        | <---(4)--- | repository       |
+    +-------------------+            +------------------+
+                                          |      ^
+                                         (2)    (3)
+                                          V      |
+                                     +------------------+
+                                     | Language Team XX |
+                                     +------------------+
+
+ * Translatable strings are marked in the source file.
+ * L10n coordinator pulls from the source (1)
+ * L10n coordinator updates the message template po/git.pot
+ * Language team pulls from L10n coordinator (2)
+ * Language team updates the message file po/XX.po
+ * L10n coordinator pulls from Language team (3)
+ * L10n coordinator asks the result to be pulled (4).
+
+
+Maintaining the po/git.pot file
+-------------------------------
+
+(This is done by the l10n coordinator).
+
+The po/git.pot file contains a message catalog extracted from Git's
+sources. The l10n coordinator maintains it by adding new translations with
+msginit(1), or update existing ones with msgmerge(1).  In order to update
+the Git sources to extract the messages from, the l10n coordinator is
+expected to pull from the main git repository at strategic point in
+history (e.g. when a major release and release candidates are tagged),
+and then run "make pot" at the top-level directory.
+
+Language contributors use this file to prepare translations for their
+language, but they are not expected to modify it.
+
+
+Initializing a XX.po file
+-------------------------
+
+(This is done by the language teams).
+
+If your language XX does not have translated message file po/XX.po yet,
+you add a translation for the first time by running:
+
+    msginit --locale=XX
+
+in the po/ directory, where XX is the locale, e.g. "de", "is", "pt_BR",
+"zh_CN", etc.
+
+Then edit the automatically generated copyright info in your new XX.po
+to be correct, e.g. for Icelandic:
+
+    @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
+    -# Icelandic translations for PACKAGE package.
+    -# Copyright (C) 2010 THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
+    -# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
+    +# Icelandic translations for Git.
+    +# Copyright (C) 2010 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
+    +# This file is distributed under the same license as the Git package.
+     # Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>, 2010.
+
+And change references to PACKAGE VERSION in the PO Header Entry to
+just "Git":
+
+    perl -pi -e 's/(?<="Project-Id-Version: )PACKAGE VERSION/Git/' XX.po
+
+Once you are done testing the translation (see below), commit the result
+and ask the l10n coordinator to pull from you.
+
+
+Updating a XX.po file
+---------------------
+
+(This is done by the language teams).
+
+If you are replacing translation strings in an existing XX.po file to
+improve the translation, just edit the file.
+
+If there's an existing XX.po file for your language, but the repository
+of the l10n coordinator has newer po/git.pot file, you would need to first
+pull from the l10n coordinator (see the beginning of this document for its
+URL), and then update the existing translation by running:
+
+    msgmerge --add-location --backup=off -U XX.po git.pot
+
+in the po/ directory, where XX.po is the file you want to update.
+
+Once you are done testing the translation (see below), commit the result
+and ask the l10n coordinator to pull from you.
+
+
+Testing your changes
+--------------------
+
+(This is done by the language teams, after creating or updating XX.po file).
+
+Before you submit your changes go back to the top-level and do:
+
+    make
+
+On systems with GNU gettext (i.e. not Solaris) this will compile your
+changed PO file with `msgfmt --check`, the --check option flags many
+common errors, e.g. missing printf format strings, or translated
+messages that deviate from the originals in whether they begin/end
+with a newline or not.
+
+
+Marking strings for translation
+-------------------------------
+
+(This is done by the core developers).
+
+Before strings can be translated they first have to be marked for
+translation.
+
+Git uses an internationalization interface that wraps the system's
+gettext library, so most of the advice in your gettext documentation
+(on GNU systems `info gettext` in a terminal) applies.
+
+General advice:
+
+ - Don't mark everything for translation, only strings which will be
+   read by humans (the porcelain interface) should be translated.
+
+   The output from Git's plumbing utilities will primarily be read by
+   programs and would break scripts under non-C locales if it was
+   translated. Plumbing strings should not be translated, since
+   they're part of Git's API.
+
+ - Adjust the strings so that they're easy to translate. Most of the
+   advice in `info '(gettext)Preparing Strings'` applies here.
+
+ - If something is unclear or ambiguous you can use a "TRANSLATORS"
+   comment to tell the translators what to make of it. These will be
+   extracted by xgettext(1) and put in the po/*.po files, e.g. from
+   git-am.sh:
+
+       # TRANSLATORS: Make sure to include [y], [n], [e], [v] and [a]
+       # in your translation. The program will only accept English
+       # input at this point.
+       gettext "Apply? [y]es/[n]o/[e]dit/[v]iew patch/[a]ccept all "
+
+   Or in C, from builtin/revert.c:
+
+       /* TRANSLATORS: %s will be "revert" or "cherry-pick" */
+       die(_("%s: Unable to write new index file"), action_name(opts));
+
+We provide wrappers for C, Shell and Perl programs. Here's how they're
+used:
+
+C:
+
+ - Include builtin.h at the top, it'll pull in gettext.h, which
+   defines the gettext interface. Consult with the list if you need to
+   use gettext.h directly.
+
+ - The C interface is a subset of the normal GNU gettext
+   interface. We currently export these functions:
+
+   - _()
+
+    Mark and translate a string. E.g.:
+
+        printf(_("HEAD is now at %s"), hex);
+
+   - Q_()
+
+    Mark and translate a plural string. E.g.:
+
+        printf(Q_("%d commit", "%d commits", number_of_commits));
+
+    This is just a wrapper for the ngettext() function.
+
+   - N_()
+
+    A no-op pass-through macro for marking strings inside static
+    initializations, e.g.:
+
+        static const char *reset_type_names[] = {
+            N_("mixed"), N_("soft"), N_("hard"), N_("merge"), N_("keep"), NULL
+        };
+
+    And then, later:
+
+        die(_("%s reset is not allowed in a bare repository"),
+               _(reset_type_names[reset_type]));
+
+    Here _() couldn't have statically determined what the translation
+    string will be, but since it was already marked for translation
+    with N_() the look-up in the message catalog will succeed.
+
+Shell:
+
+ - The Git gettext shell interface is just a wrapper for
+   gettext.sh. Import it right after git-sh-setup like this:
+
+       . git-sh-setup
+       . git-sh-i18n
+
+   And then use the gettext or eval_gettext functions:
+
+       # For constant interface messages:
+       gettext "A message for the user"; echo
+
+       # To interpolate variables:
+       details="oh noes"
+       eval_gettext "An error occurred: \$details"; echo
+
+   In addition we have wrappers for messages that end with a trailing
+   newline. I.e. you could write the above as:
+
+       # For constant interface messages:
+       gettextln "A message for the user"
+
+       # To interpolate variables:
+       details="oh noes"
+       eval_gettextln "An error occurred: \$details"
+
+   More documentation about the interface is available in the GNU info
+   page: `info '(gettext)sh'`. Looking at git-am.sh (the first shell
+   command to be translated) for examples is also useful:
+
+       git log --reverse -p --grep=i18n git-am.sh
+
+Perl:
+
+ - The Git::I18N module provides a limited subset of the
+   Locale::Messages functionality, e.g.:
+
+       use Git::I18N;
+       print __("Welcome to Git!\n");
+       printf __("The following error occurred: %s\n"), $error;
+
+   Run `perldoc perl/Git/I18N.pm` for more info.
+
+
+Testing marked strings
+----------------------
+
+Even if you've correctly marked porcelain strings for translation
+something in the test suite might still depend on the US English
+version of the strings, e.g. to grep some error message or other
+output.
+
+To smoke out issues like these, Git tested with a translation mode that
+emits gibberish on every call to gettext. To use it run the test suite
+with it, e.g.:
+
+    cd t && GIT_TEST_GETTEXT_POISON=true prove -j 9 ./t[0-9]*.sh
+
+If tests break with it you should inspect them manually and see if
+what you're translating is sane, i.e. that you're not translating
+plumbing output.
+
+If not you should replace calls to grep with test_i18ngrep, or
+test_cmp calls with test_i18ncmp. If that's not enough you can skip
+the whole test by making it depend on the C_LOCALE_OUTPUT
+prerequisite. See existing test files with this prerequisite for
+examples.