translation: http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress
troubleshooting: install same locales, restart apache

1. create .pot from sources. takes output from find, which goes thru all subdirs.
2. edit .po to translate
3. convert to .mo
msgfmt -o filename.mo filename.po


step 1 for grabbing translation strings from all formats in use by project:
NOTE: 
- messages.po needs to exist
- and have set: charset=utf-8
eg. PHP that uses __ prefix before every string that is to be translated, like __('hello world')
find <dir> -iname "*.php" -exec xgettext -j --keyword=__ {} \;