The documentation and its translations reside in subdirectories. When building the documentation, the toplevel Makefile goes into the subdirectories listed in the SUBDIRS variable and executes make in each of those directories to create the HTML documentation in subdirectories of the 'HTML' directory. IMPORTANT: Do NOT place sensitive files under 'HTML'! It is for generated documentation only. The whole directory tree is wiped out by the Makefile when running 'make distclean' or 'make clean'. Each subdirectory must have a Makefile. Its purpose is to include the toplevel Makefile.inc file (with the rules to build the docs) and add dependency information to the main target, $(HTMLDIR)/index.html. The main target usually depends on all the XML files in the subdirectory. Adding new translations ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1) Create a new subdirectory and copy the XML files there. main.xml must not be copied, it is autogenerated. 2) Make sure to create a 'Makefile' for the translation -- you can use 'en/Makefile' as an example. 3) In each translated file after the tag you must put a note like , where 2 is the revision of corresponding English file (see comment at the top of file). That's all, in theory.