Preferences Dialog
You could show Preferences dialog by choosing Settings Configure KBabel... from KBabel menu. It uses a structured configuration dialog which makes it very easy to find every option without extensive search. The left side of the preferences dialog lists categories for customizable items and the right side shows the corresponding tab for the selected category. KBabel keeps changes if you move between categories, so, finally, when you're happy click the OK button. At any moment you can use quick help. Just click on the question mark on the title bar and, after the cursor changed like an arrow with a question mark, click on buttons, labels, entries to obtain more info on the specified item.

Identity
This section allows you to set standard fields for every translated PO file. These are your name, email address, full language name, email address for your translation team mailing list. Also, there is even timezone to track last modified time for PO file. You can specify it as character sequence like EEST or offset from GMT time like +0200 (i.e. for Romania). This information is used when updating file header. You can find the options if and what fields in the header should be updated on section Save in Preferences dialog.

Editor
The editor preferences category is divided in 3 subwindows: General, Appearance, Spell Check, and Fonts. All these settings customize how the editor behaves and looks.

General
Here is a set of checkboxes. First checkbox in upper side sets if fuzzy status is reseted automatically at first character input in MsgStr editor. When this option is disabled you have to manually choose Edit Unset Fuzzy Status or press the Ctrl U shortcut. This means the string ", fuzzy" is removed from the entry's comment.
The downside checkboxes group are very usefull in assisting not for translation corectness, but for logical. Many messages represent menu items with keyboard accelerator and C-like formated strings.
Check Arguments 	 When is checked C-format strings in original and translation are checked to find if number of format sequences is identical and also order.
Check Accelerator 	 Check to find if number of accelerator characters is identical in both original and translated string. Please note that accelerator marker is &, but not in every programming toolkit. See Miscellaneous section below to find how to change keyboard accelerator.
Check Equation 	 This is a feature for KDE project development. .desktop files are simply text files which store various parameters in value=key format. Some of these key are translatable. The only restriction is to maintain the left side of equality unchanged. Equation check allow you to spot many errors determined by fuzzy msgmerge algorithm. Note that are situations where this function generate false errors on some PO-files.
Look for Translated Context Info 	 Some original messages are marked with context information to make them unique even they represent same word. This is because in the simple "Save" word is translated in many kinds in other languages. Context info is marked with _:. Many unexperienced translators do even context info translation and fill their PO-files with garbage. Check this box to make sure you will be warned about these errors in file.
Beep on error 	 Your system bell will beep when you switch on entries with errors like those described above.
Change text color on error 	 This is another type of warning about errors in current message. For persons deaf impaired or are bored by bell noise, here is a good solution. Check this. See also Appearance tab to know how to change text color on errors.

Appearance
These options let you configure the appearance for the message editor. In upper part there are 4 checkboxes:
Highlight syntax 	 Setting this option will enable syntax highlighting for special characters, accelerators and text background in msgid viewer and msgstr editor. If don't have a monochrome display or have a visual impairment, you should enable this option.
Highlight background 	 Background will be highlighted only for existing characters in msgid and msgstr. This includes spaces. That is useful, if you don't want to see surrounding quotes (see below) for the PO entry, you will still be able to observe starting and ending spaces in a text line.
Mark whitespaces with points 	 When you feel the need to count spaces right from an eye or background highlighting is not your taste, then you can check this option to view whitespaces filled with points. Note that point is a point sign in the center of a character box, and not a decimal point.
Show surrounding quotes 	 If you think that viewing terminal char in msgstr or msgids text line is better for you then check this option to view surrounding quotes for every text line. Same thing if your experience editing PO files with ordinary text editors make you feel safe if you can track starting and ending double quotes in PO entry lines.
For different items in edited text there are different color choices to make editing easy. Colors can be changed by clicking on color-picker buttons. From select color dialogs you can choose from standard colors, custom colors or just pick color from any part of your screen.
Background color 	 This sets the background color for characters in MsgID view and MsgStr editor. For general background color of edit box you must use KDE Control Center.
Color for quoted characters 	 Here you can adjust the color for escaped characters like (\") double quotes or (\n) newline.
Color for syntax errors 	 This is the color for the entire text entry if errors are detected when you try to save PO file. Errors are triggered by not terminating identically both msgid and msgstr, or escaping characters incorrectly.
Color for c-format characters 	 This sets the color for a characters sequence like in C language printf or scanf functions. In general these start with (%) percent char and are continued by one char.
Color for keyboard accelerators 	 Keyboard accelerators start with (&) ampersand character in KDE but if you are translating for other projects there might be an different character marking the accelerator key. See Miscellaneous section below to find how to change keyboard accelerator.
The status for the current edited entry is marked by three LEDs. For your convenience you can choose where to put these LEDs: in statusbar or in editor (between msgid and msgstr entry). If have difficulties to view some colors or you want to make sure you can track LED status changes easily without moving your eye, you can select the prefered color using the color button chooser.

Spell Check
Here you can set your spell checking preferences. These is for interest if you have dictionary file for your translating language. Bellow are items to consider setting:
Create root/affix combinations not in dictionary 	 For new words added to personal dictionary, spell check engine will create root/affix combinations to match more than one word (variations).
Consider run-together words as spelling errors 	 If this is turned on, then joined words will be treated as errors. However, this situations is very usual in German language which have a very large number of compound words.
Dictionary 	 From the popup list you can choose which dictionary to use. Note that you must install apropiate dictionary for your language. Check your ispell or aspell distribution to figure out if you have one.
Encoding 	 Here you choose encoding for your text. This options is passed to spellchecker. It is encoding for your words dictionary. See kspell documentation for more details.
Client 	 Backend program for spell checking. Currently are to: ispell (International Ispell) and aspell.
Remember ignored words 	 Keep track of user ignored words when spell check PO-files. It's very convenient to ignore abbreviations or strange letter combinations you meet in GUI interfaces.
File to store ignored words 	 Here you can set location of file for ignored words. Clicking on folder icon from editline right side you can choose path and name for ignored words file. Default is $(HOME)/.kde/share/apps/kbabel/spellignores, where $(HOME) is your home directory.

Fonts
This is a classic font chooser dialog with a little addition. You can select to view only fixed fonts by checking the Show only fixed fonts option. This is highly recomended for easy translating. The font dialog let you set font family, style, size and encoding. The bottom box shows a preview of the current for user convenience.

Search
The search section allows you to customize various settings for searching in previous translated strings.

General
General settings are common for all search types. If you check Automatically start search option then search is automatically started whenever you switch to another entry in the editor. At the moment there are at three posibilies you can choose from. But since KBabel can use dictionary plugins the available dictionaries depends what is actually installed. With Settings Configure Dictionary ... you can configure every search engine plugin. The default installed dictionarys plugins are:
KDE Database Search Engine: This new method is still in alpha stage of development and base it task on KBabelDict which acompany KBabel. See KBabelDict documentation for further info on configuring search engine.
PO Compendium: The compendium is a normal PO file, which should contain a list of standard translation from your translation team. If you don't have one, you can also use a file that contains all used translations of your team (e.g. the $lang.messages file in the KDE Project, that can be found at i18n.kde.org).
PO Auxiliary: The auxiliary should help you finding the context of a translation by looking up the same message in a message catalog of the same package but translated to another language. This way you can have a look how this message is translated in another language.
You can also start searching manually by choosing an entry in the popup menu that appears either when clicking at Dictionaries Search Text PO Compendium or keeping the search button in the toolbar pressed for a while.

Save
This section allows you to edit the options for PO file saving. The first checkboxes group control general hehaviour for actions performed at PO-file saving command.
Update header when saving 	 Check this button, to update the header information of the file everytime when it is saved. The header normally keeps information about the date and time the file was last updated,the last translator etc. You can choose which information you want to update from the Fields to update checkboxes area below. Fields that do not exist are added to the header. If you want to add additional fields to the header you can edit the header manually by choosing Edit Edit Header in the editor window.
Check syntax of file when saving 	 Check this to automatically check syntax of file with msgfmt --statistics when saving a file. You will only get a message, if an error occured. You should keep this options enabled unless know what you're doing.
If you don't want to touch some fields in PO-file header or want to force updating specific fields, there are five checkboxes which control: revision date, PO-file language, text encoding, last translator name, charset. If a field does not exist, it is appended to the header. If you want to add other information to the header, you have to edit the header manually by choosing Edit Edit Header in the editor window. Deactivate Update header when saving above if you don't want to have the header updated.
For date and time of the header field PO-Revision-Date you can choose one from bellow formats:
Default is the format normally used in PO-files.
Local is the format specific to your country.
Custom let you define your own format, where you can use the following C-like format strings:

Year
Format	Meaning	Range
%y	year	00 to 99
%Y	year	0001 to 9999

Month
Format	Meaning	Range
%m	month of year	01 to 12
%f	month of year	1 to 12
%b,%h	month abbreviation	Jan to Dec

Day
Format	Meaning	Range
%j	day of the year	001 to 366
%d	day of month	01 to 31
%e	day of month	1 to 31
%a	weekday abbreviation	Sun to Sat

Hour
Format	Meaning	Range
%H	hour	00 to 23
%k	hour	0 to 23
%i	hour	1 to 12
%I	hour	01 to 12
%p		AM or PM

Minute, Second, Timezone
Format	Meaning	Range
%M	minute	00 to 59
%S	second	00 to 59
%Z	timezone	(given in identity settings)
Downside part group encoding options for PO-file when saving. If you work on KDE project you should be aware that at least desktop.po file must be UTF-8 encoded. Popup list let you select messages encoding. At least your language setting and UTF-8 must be. If, for some reasons, you don't want accidentaly change current PO-file encoding, turn on Keep the encoding of the file.

Catalog Manager
This section allows you to edit the options for the Catalog Manager.

General
Here are two editlines with Browse... buttons. Type in the directories which contains all your PO- and respectively POT-files. The files and the directories in these directories will then be merged into one tree in Catalog Manager window.
Below you can turn on and off if:
Open files in new window 	 If this is activated all files that are opened from the Catalog Manager are opened in a new window.
Kill processes on exit 	 If you check this KBabel tries to kill the processes, that are not exited already when program close by sending a kill signal to them.
It's not guaranteed, that the processes are killed.

Directory Commands
Here you can insert commands you want to execute in directories from the Catalog Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalog Manager's context menu.
Insert in field Name the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In field Command insert the command, you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press Edit button and press Add after you have finished. To remove a command, select one from list and press Remove button. If you want different order in contexual submenu, you can use up and down buttons.
The command is executed through your default shell, so you can execute multiple commands at once by separating them with a semicolon, and you can set environment variables, if you need. The commands are executed in the (PO-file) directory, you have selected in the Catalog Manager.
The following strings will be replaced in a command:
@PACKAGE@: The name of the directory without path
@PODIR@: The name of the PO-directory with path
@POTDIR@: The name of the template directory with path
E.g.: If you want to execute make and then make install you could insert in field Name Make install and in field Command make; make install. If you then select Commands Make install from the context menu of a directory, the commands listed above will be executed in this directory.

File Commands
Here you can insert the commands you want to execute on files from the Catalog Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalog Manager's context menu.
Insert in field Name the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In field Command insert the command, you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press Edit and press Add after you have finished. To remove a command, select one from list and press Remove button. If you want different order in contexual submenu, you can use up and down buttons.
The command is executed through your default shell, so you can execute multiple commands at once by separating them with a semicolon, and you can set environment variables, if you need. The commands are executed in the (PO-file) directory, in which the file, you have selected in the Catalog Manager, is.
The following strings will be replaced in a command:
@PACKAGE@: The name of the file without path and extension
@POFILE@: The name of the PO-file with path and extension
@POTFILE@: The name of the corresponding template file with path and extension
@PODIR@: The name of the directory, the PO-file is in, with path
@POTDIR@: The name of the directory, the template file is in, with path
E.g.: If you want to merge the template file into your PO-file you could insert in field Name Merge and in field Command msgmerge @POFILE@ @POTFILE@ > @PACKAGE@.new && mv @PACKAGE@.new "@PACKAGE@.po. If you then select Commands Merge from a file's context menu, the PO-file will be merged with its template file.

Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous section hold settings which don't feet anywhere. Currently are two:
Marker for keyboard accelerator 	 Here you can put your own character which serve as marker for keyboard accelerator indicator in GUI. By default it is & (ampersand), but in some programing toolkits it may vary. For example in Gnome/GTK translations the underscore character _ is the marker for the keyboard accelerator.
Regular expression for context information 	 For unexperienced user "regular expression" sound strange. However, you're advised to change default value only you know what you are doing. Some GUI programming toolkits provide own context information description methods. Consult an experienced developer if you translate PO files other than KDE specifics. For the sake of completness I "translate" for you what default regular expression mean: "the text match if it start with _: and is followed by one or more characters and end with a newline".