Distributing the translation effort

To facilitate easier handling of a community translation effort, the Drupal POT file is split up into small files that do not contain doubly occurring strings.

All strings that occur more than once in the Drupal core distribution are put into the general.pot file. This ensures that those strings are translated to the same string. Also, files that have ten or less translatable strings will not get their own POT file, but those strings will be appended to the general.pot file.

Of course, some coordination among the project members is still needed to ensure the quality of the translation.

If a language has several options on how to translate some strings, then it is possible to create PO files that only change those strings. An example would be German where your can translate you either as Du or Sie depending on the audience of your site.