I made a custom theme and wonder how could I extract all translatable strings to a .po file so I can translate it. Do I need WPML plugin?
Ex: I have a string “soccer” which is written as _e('soccer','mytheme'); and I want to translate it to “futebol” but how can I transport it to a .po file?
One way is to use the WordPress i18n tools. I had to checkout WordPress trunk to make it work. On the command line:
svn co http://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk
once you have trunk somewhere, you’ll then want to call the makepot script. Again, on the command line:
php /path/to/wordpress/trunk/tools/i18n/makepot.php wp-theme /path/to/your/theme/
After that script has run, the pot files will be in whatever directory was specified in the above /path/to/your/theme
More information and a couple of other methods can be seen here: http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers