This is a buildout recipe. It creates an i18n directory within one or more zope 2 instances in your buildout. It copies some .po files to those directories. The translations in those .po files will override any other translations.

This is tested for Plone 3 with Zope 2.10. It should work for a plain Zope site without Plone as well, as there is nothing Plone specific to this recipe. It should work fine for all previous versions as well.

For Plone 4 and Zope 2.12 it has no effect: there is no code anymore in those versions that looks for translations in an i18n folder of your instance. You should create an own package and register a locales directory with translation in it. For more info or questions, see the plone-internationalization mailing list.

An example use case is:

• In the Dutch Plone translations the msgid 'Manager' is translated as 'Beheerder'.
• A customer wanted it to be translated as 'Site admin' instead.
• Just putting this translation within the i18n directory of the customer product is not guaranteed to work as it depends on the order in which the i18n folders get read on Zope startup: is CMFPlone/i18n or Customer/i18n read first.
• When you create an i18n directory within the zope 2 instance and add a po file with that msgid there, this is guaranteed to get used.

Note that this should work for overriding translations within i18n directories. Overriding translations in locales directories is not a use case of this recipe.

What should be in the .po file? You need all the headers that are normally in .po files. So copy the headers of the current .po file that has the translation that you want to override. Then just add the msgid and a new msgstr. The name of the file does not really matter. It should be meaningful to you and end with '.po'. In the mentioned use case it makes sense to call it plone-nl.po as that is the name of the original file from the plone translations. The contents would be something like this (non-interesting header lines skipped for clarity):

msgid ""
msgstr ""
...
"Language-Code: nl\n"
"Language-Name: Nederlands\n"
"Domain: plone\n"

msgid "Manager"
msgstr "Site admin"