Well, anyone needing this information should be able to read and understand english. Why? Well most tools are described in english and usually you end up translating from english to something else.
So, first of all you should get yourself a piece of software to get started. I choose a simple and free available one.
https://github.com/vslavik/poedit
This is available for Windows, Mac or Linux. Then again if you are sitting on a Linux box you can get the gettext package directly out of your favorit repository and that is really all you need. But of course you can also use poedit on Linux.
Wenn I started this articel in 2013 I was going to describe how to go about it, but since then a lot has happened. It move from sourceforge to github and has got its own website: https://poedit.net/
So why am I writing this now? Wel I just needed to do some translating for an OpenSource Projekt and the where using PO files. So I was actually looking for my own post and found that it was laying there in a „Started“ state an nothing else.
Sorry.