POT files The first stage is to generate a .pot for your plugin or theme. This is done by way of the xgettext utility as part of gettext. You will need to have the gettext package installed if you want to do this generation on-site.

GNU gettext is designed to minimize the impact of internationalization on program sources, keeping this impact as small and hardly noticeable as possible. Internationalization has better chances of succeeding if it is very light weighted, or at least, appear to be so, when looking at program sources.