1.4 Files Conveying Translations

The letters PO in `.po' files means Portable Object, to distinguish it from `.mo' files, where MO stands for Machine Object. This paradigm, as well as the PO file format, is inspired by the NLS standard developed by Uniforum, and first implemented by Sun in their Solaris system.

PO files are meant to be read and edited by humans, and associate each original, translatable string of a given package with its translation in a particular target language. A single PO file is dedicated to a single target language. If a package supports many languages, there is one such PO file per language supported, and each package has its own set of PO files. These PO files are best created by the xgettext program, and later updated or refreshed through the msgmerge program. Program xgettext extracts all marked messages from a set of C files and initializes a PO file with empty translations. Program msgmerge takes care of adjusting PO files between releases of the corresponding sources, commenting obsolete entries, initializing new ones, and updating all source line references. Files ending with `.pot' are kind of base translation files found in distributions, in PO file format.

MO files are meant to be read by programs, and are binary in nature. A few systems already offer tools for creating and handling MO files as part of the Native Language Support coming with the system, but the format of these MO files is often different from system to system, and non-portable. The tools already provided with these systems don't support all the features of GNU gettext. Therefore GNU gettext uses its own format for MO files. Files ending with `.gmo' are really MO files, when it is known that these files use the GNU format.