First join the sinhala at linux lk mailing list. Reading the archive is a good starting point to know what is going on.

Please keep an eye on the Siyabas Web Site as the central location for Sinhala Language related work on all platforms.

To get started working on translations, first make sure you have properly working Sinhala Unicode.

On Debian-like systems, you may have to enable si_LK.UTF-8 locale by adding this line to /etc/locale.gen:

si_LK UTF-8

and running the "locale-gen" command as root.

KBabel seems to be a popular choice among translators, and Poedit is also another choice. Editing PO files with any text editor that supports Unicode is also possible, although you may miss nice features like language databases.

To get an idea on translation, here is a quick exercise, assuming you have pidgin installed.

In this example, we copy a translated from another locale (de), translate it again using kbabel, and copy the translated file for Sinhala (si).

% cd /tmp
% cp /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/pidgin.mo .
% msgunfmt -o pidgin.po pidgin.mo
% kbabel pidgin.po
% msgfmt -o pidgin.mo pidgin.po
% su
# mkdir -p /usr/share/locale/si/LC_MESSAGES
# cp pidgin.mo /usr/share/locale/si/LC_MESSAGES/

Now set the locale to si_LK.UTF-8 and run pidgin.

% export LC_ALL=si_LK.UTF-8
% pidgin

For Sinhala language related matters not specific to FOSS, you may want to check out the Sinhala Unicode Group. Note that this group is made up of a diverse group of people, so if you join, please respect others' views, and keep the conversations friendly. Please note that it is a separate group not affiliated with the LK-LUG.