Localizations for MonoDevelop are based on the Gettext system.

The localizations are stored in *.po files called catalogs, one per language, and a reference catalog called messages.po that contains all the localizable strings.

To edit a localization, find the find the ISO standard country code for your translation, e.g. da for Danish (Denmark), then open the catalog matching that code, e.g. da.po.

You can then open this catalog in a text file, or a Gettext GUI editor such as MonoDevelop itself. Unfortunately, testing a localization is difficult without building MonoDevelop from source.

If the catalog for your language does not exist, make a copy of the reference catalog and rename it to match the expected name for your language. To add it to the MonoDevelop build, add it to the following lists:

• the ALL_LINGUAS variable in the ../configure.in script
• the <GettextTranslation> and <Translation> items in the mo.mdproj file

Finally, commit your updated localization and make a pull request to the MonoDevelop respository. Alternatively you may attach it to a bug report.

On Mac/Linux machines, with MonoDevelop set up to build from source, executing the make update-po command in this directory will regenerate the reference catalog by scanning the MonoDevelop source, and then use it to update the all of the language-specific catalogs.

NOTE: In general this is not necessary, as the .po files in the source repository are regularly updated this way.