Once your awk program is working, and all the strings have
been marked and you’ve set (and perhaps bound) the text domain,
it is time to produce translations.
First, use the --gen-pot command-line option to create
the initial .pot file:
gawk --gen-pot -f guide.awk > guide.pot
When run with --gen-pot, gawk does not execute your
program. Instead, it parses it as usual and prints all marked strings
to standard output in the format of a GNU gettext Portable Object
file. Also included in the output are any constant strings that
appear as the first argument to dcgettext() or as the first and
second argument to dcngettext().93
You should distribute the generated .pot file with
your awk program; translators will eventually use it
to provide you translations that you can also then distribute.
See A Simple Internationalization Example
for the full list of steps to go through to create and test
translations for guide.