If you want to translate your wiki into another language, there are essentially three pieces needed for a complete translation:

1. The messages in the ikiwiki program itself need to be translated. Ikiwiki is internationalised, and most such messages are already marked with gettext(). The source tarball includes a po/ikiwiki.pot that can be copied and translated as a po file. All very standard.

   Note that a few things in the source are not currently translated. These include:

   • Error messages of the "should never happen" variety.
   • Certian info in commit messages, which is not visible from inside the wiki, but is visible in the commit logs. This needs to stay in English so that ikiwiki can parse it back out of the logs.
   • Some parts of FormBuilder forms, which should be translatable by adding templates. Note that these forms don't need templates for the English version.
   • The name of the index page, which has a special meaning to browsers anyway.
   • The names of some other pages, like sidebar and openid.
   • The names and values of parameters, both to the program, in the setup file, and in preprocessor directives.

2. The basewiki needs to be translated. The po ikiwiki plugin will allow translating wikis using po files and can be used for this.

   There is now a website, l10n.ikiwiki.info that both demos the translated basewiki, and allows easy translation of it.

   To generate the po and pot files for translating the basewiki, get ikiwiki's source, edit the po/underlay.setup file, adding your language. Then run 'make -C po underlays. This will generate many po files underpo/underlays. The first ones you'll want to translate are in thepo/underlays/basewikidirectory, which is really not very large, just a few thousand words. After that is done, you can tackle those under po/underlays/directives`, which are a much larger (tens of thousands of words).

3. The templates also need to be translated. Some work has been done on an infrastructure for maintaining translated templates, as documented in l10n, but until that's complete, you'd need to copy and translate the templates by hand.