Overview of Translating Sugar
From SugarCRM Wiki
Welcome to Sugar. It is a straight-forward process to translate the Sugar application as all screen labels and inline help are stored in simple text files.
You may wonder how large the effort is to translate the application into a different language. Sugar Open Source 4.5 has around 5302 lines in 68 files which translates to 16421 words and 91152 characters. The Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise languages pack are about 40% - 50% larger than the Open Source.
New to Sugar 4.5 are the inline help files. There are approximately 100 help files, and translating them will take additional time beyond creating the language pack for just the screen labels.
Note that you will find some strings are duplicated across various modules. Understanding the context of how a string is used is important in creating a language pack.
Starting with Sugar 4.5, you have to use editor that can save text files in the UTF8 character set (like Notepad ++).
If you are updating an existing language pack, you will find this language pack sync tool valuable: http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5686&page=2
Next Steps:
