Poedit

If you need to edit a translation for a program or website that uses Gettext for localization, conventional editors, like Notepad will only make your work more difficult. The preferred tool for such operations is Poedit. It provides full support for Gettext, so you can make translations for various projects, including WordPress, PHP or Django. What's more, the application is free and open source and it is also cross-platform, so you can use it on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

Using Poedit is quite easy, due to the clean and efficient layout of its user interface. When launched, the application will present three options, for editing an existing translation, creating a new one and for translating a WordPress theme or plugin. Existing translations can be loaded from PO files. The same type of files must be loaded when creating a new translation, but you can load POT templates as well.

Once you load a PO or POT file, the application will display the original text fragments and their translations side by side, in different columns. Obviously, if you decide to create a new translation, the second column will be blank. Source text and translations can be edited in separate fields, in the lower region of the interface, where you can also add personal notes for your translations. A translation's properties can be edited on a tabbed panel, on which you can specify a project name, the used languages and make other tweaks, like choosing default plural forms for the selecting languages or typing your own forms.

Poedit provides support for numerous languages. What's more, it comes with a validation function for your translations. All you have to do is click a button, in the upper right corner of the interface and Poedit will tell you if there are any problems that need your attention. It is also possible to mark individual translations as "fuzzy", if you are not entirely sure about a translation's accuracy. The translation can be saved as GNU Gettext catalog (.po) or in HTML format.