The spellchecker is a set of scripts which manipulate po files and produce statistics usually displayed on a web page. Spotting typos is the most obvious feature, but translators can use it to improve the overall quality of their translations. Translations are often spread over a bunch of po files translated by different people with different styles even if belonging to the same language-team; the spellchecker gathers all of its output in a per language rather than per po file basis, so that each translator using it, will check not only his/her own translations. The statistics page (&url-spellchecker-status;) contains the following columns for every language supported: "Language" - extended English name of the language and corresponding ISO code Unknown words - is the number of unique words not found in the dictionary of a particular language. - , which means that the spellchecker is not configured to check translations for this language (usually because an aspell dictionary for the language is not available) Messages - contains all the strings for lang extracted from the po files: you can use any spellchecker against this file to look for typos. This file is very useful also when improving consistency: when translations are spread over many po files, it is difficult to make sure that certain rules are applied to all files, so here you can check for example that "CD-ROM" is written always the same way. List of unknown words - is a sorted list of words not found in the aspell dictionary along with the number of occurrences. suspect variables - po files often contain variables ${LIKE_THIS}; a script checks that the name of the variable in the msgid is matched in the msgstr. It is also checked that the number of variables in the msgstr is the same in the msgid. custom wordlist - translators can write a list of custom words not found in the aspell dictionary for their language. More details about wordlists can be found here (FIXME). all files - is a tarball containing all the above files. Translators can download it and work off-line. Sometimes columns are followed by a "(*)": it means that the associated file has changed since the last time the spellchecker was run. By clicking on the "(*)" it is possible to see what changed. First of all you should look for errors: typically typos or wrong variables. The list of unknown words contains words not in the aspell dictionary and out of their context; once one has been found, you need to locate the error in the po file. Since Messages contains all the (translated) strings for all the po files, you can look for the wrong word there; the structure of the text file is the following: *** path1/lang.po - "strings for this file" *** path2/lang.po - "strings for this file" ... *** pathN/lang.po - "strings for this file" If the word is easy to find you won't need any help from me to locate it and you just need to see which po file it belongs to. Emacs has a very handy function "forward-paragraph" (ctrl-up on my system) that takes you directly to the line containing the path. Otherwise you can search backward for "*** " to find it. Things can be more complicated if the unknown word is very short and so it is matched too many times inside the file because it is a sub-word of longer words; in that case you should use regexps to restrict your search. Here follow a few practical examples that can help you; refer to some documentation about regexp to find out more. If you use emacs you can match an exact word by using isearch-forward-regexp and "\<word\>". From the shell you can run 'grep -nw "word" lang_all.txt' (the n parameter will tell grep to print the line number where the match occurs). Sometimes you may have to look for something like "a word composed by two letters: the first is "p" the second is not a printable char"; in that case "word" in the previous examples can be replaced with "p." Variables in po files are of the form ${VARIABLE}; the spellchecker is able to catch the following common mistakes: mispelled variable names wrong braces missing $ character different number of variables in the msgid and the msgstr The variable name should not be translated in the msgstr and braces should not be changed. The variable name is replaced with something more useful at run-time; if the translator manipulates it, the results will be rather ugly. When the original msgid contains multiple occurrences of a particular variable, sometimes translators translate the string as to use the variable just once; the script will report such strings as wrong and it is up to the translator to check if it is a mistake or not (this is the main reason for calling them suspect variables).