There are a couple of things that should be kept in mind when translating Gnumeric. Gnumeric, unlike regular applications includes strings used to render numbers in various ways: as dates, as times, as currency, number, as accounting-formatted numbers. You should usually leave alone during the general language translation the number formatting and the date formatting codes. For example, in México, we speak spanish (language code "es"), so a spanish translation should be done for all of the messages in the program in the file es.po. Dates in México are represented as day/month/year. The Gnumeric default is to follow the rules for the US, which are month/day/year. Now, instead of adding those translations to the es.po file, those strings should be added to a per-country file, in this example the "es_MX.po" file. Currency in México uses the same symbols, so those format codes are left untouched. Decimal point separator and thousand separators in Mexico are, again, the same as in the US, so they are left untouched. So, basically: when doing currency/date/number format translation, make sure no other country that uses your language has a different set of rules (when in doubt, just dont touch the formatting codes and add your localized version to the nn_MM.po file). Gnumeric uses the locale information to distinguish which character is used as a thousand separator and which one is used as a decimal separator. On the number formatting strings, use your country decimal separator as the decimal separator. For example, given the format in Gnumeric "#.00", French translators for France should change that to "#,00". Thus, the default format "#,##0" (which means show at least one number, but separate the thousands with commas) should be translated in this case to "#.##0".