First of all, please be aware that it only makes sense to translate the
Planet openSUSE interface in languages that are actually aggregated on
the site.

In order to provide translations, please proceed as follows:

1) Download the .pot template
=============================
The .pot is a plain text template file that contains all the localizable
strings that are used by Planet openSUSE.

To download that file to the current directory:
wget http://gitorious.org/opensuse/planet-opensuse/blobs/raw/master/locale/planetsuse.pot

2) Make a copy for the target language
======================================
For the sake of the example, let's say you would like to provide a German
translation (German having the language code "de"):

cp planetsuse.pot de.po

3) Translate
============
Translate the localizable strings in the .po file you created/copied in the
previous step, using either any text editor or an editor that has specialized
PO (gettext) support, such as Emacs, gted, poedit, gtranslator, kbabel, etc...

4) Submit
=========
Please send the resulting .po file (de.po in our example) to pascal.bleser@opensuse.org

Thanks!


UPDATING AN EXISTING TRANSLATION
================================

Note that the procedure above is to provide a previously untranslated target
language. If there is already a .po file for the language you would like to
translate Planet openSUSE in, but that .po file is out of sync with the latest
localizable strings used on the site, the procedure is slightly different:

1) Update the .pot template
===========================
Using the same URL as in step (1) above, replace your current planetsuse.pot
file with the most recent one:

rm planetsuse.pot
wget http://gitorious.org/opensuse/planet-opensuse/blobs/raw/master/locale/planetsuse.pot

2) Merge the template with the .po file
=======================================
If you are the original author and/or current maintainer of a translation,
then you probably already have the latest .po file (e.g. de.po) on your host.

If not, also make sure to have the latest .po file, e.g.:
rm de.po
wget http://gitorious.org/opensuse/planet-opensuse/blobs/raw/master/locale/de.po

Now it is necessary to merge the localizable strings from the .pot template
file with what has already been translated in the .po file.
This process is *not* destructive, as it will both
- retain the translations that have already been made in the .po file, at least
  as long as they are still relevant and used by the Planet openSUSE site
- try to automatically translate new localizable strings with existing translations
  from the .po file, by applying some fuzzy logic (that usually doesn't work out
  that well though)

The command to perform the merge is as follows, still taking de.po as the example:

msgmerge -U de.po planetsuse.pot

Note that the "-U" parameter tells msgmerge to update the existing .po file
in-place, and that the order of the files is first the .po file and then the
.pot template file.

From here on, steps (3) and (4) from above apply as well.