I have created a bug for this in the bugtracker as this affects my Swedish translation as well.
It is clear now that as long as I don’t try to translate the widget’s name that appears in the block header, the widget will display. Translating coded strings in the block content doesn’t seem to have any effect.
Of course, I will have to translate the widget name, but this would seem to point to where the problem is – some incompatibility between the header code and the UTF-8 coding for accented characters.
Where’s that tracker entry?
MartinNr5: Was just starting do translate to swedish for my site http://www.ronaldblogg.se go and check it out. Would you like to share your translation?
Hope to hear from you..
Howdy. I’m not sure why there is a problem. Here’s what I think is happening.
register_sidebar_widget( __(‘Members’, ‘buddypress’), ‘bp_core_widget_members’);
That registers the members widget with translation. If in your .mo and .po file the word “Members” is translated then it should work fine. This is what you are doing?
Make sure you remove all widgets before translating, if you translate after you have added widgets, they will be removed. It’s due to a limitation on register_sidebar_widget() and unfortunately there is not much that can be done about it.
So Andy, if I understand correctly we will just have to live with the fact that we cant translate these widgets:
Welcome
Recent Posts
Who’s online
Members
Groups
Because I removed all widgets before translating and they still won’t show up. Would appreciate an answer, please!
You should know that there is some people (like me), that is having this problems with the widgets using spanish translation. Widgets welcome, groups, site wide activity, blog recent post, and 2 o 3 more … they dissapear when we put the spanish translation as default.
Is a very big problem! we are sad!
ANDY HELP US!! = )
ANDY AYUDANOS! = )
Sorry for my bad english
download the last svn version of buddypress, upload it, then set your language to your language, and last add all your widgets.
Is this still an issue? Thought that dumping the widgets after installing the localization file and then putting them back in again fixes this problem.
Week old. No traffic. Red light off.
I am still having this problem. I removed all widgets, set the language back to English, deleted the german .mo and .po files, updated the options, put the language files back into place and last added the widgets again. Still “Who’s online”, “Site wide activity” and “Groups” do not show.
Hello all.
I had this same problem when I tried to use the Portuguese translation and this is how I fixed it.
1) Remove all your bp widgets.
2) Open translation.po
3) Find bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php (it is mentioned many times and write down the line numbers)
4) Open mu-plugins/bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php
5) Translate manually the lines where the translation file was supposed to do it.
6) re-upload mu-plugins/bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php
7) activate widgets that now will be named on your translation language e.g. “welcome” will be “Bienvenido”
send me a beer!
Voila!
note: you´ll have to do the same with all bp-NAME-widgets.php files
e.g. bp-blogs-widgets.php
bp-core-widgets.php
bp-activity-widgets.php
you get the point…
Some questions….
1) Remove all your bp widgets. (Done that)
2) Open translation.po
(Where is that file located?)
3) Find bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php (it is mentioned many times and write down the line numbers)
(Didn’t find it….) ??
4) Open mu-plugins/bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php
5) Translate manually the lines where the translation file was supposed to do it.
(Can anyone tell me the line numbers?)
6) re-upload mu-plugins/bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php
7) activate widgets that now will be named on your translation language e.g. “welcome” will be “Bienvenido”
send me a beer!
(Ill send you 20 beers if you help me) 
Thanks yall!!
For all who are still having this issue. There was a bug fix 3 weeks ago that addressed this issue. See Changeset 1244. All widgets that come with BuddyPress were fixed with this revision.
If you are not running at least BuddyPress r1244, then you will still have issues.
Note: Custom widgets (3rd-party developed widgets), may or may not have implemented this bug fix. Therefore, if you are having translation issues with non-core BP widgets, you will need to contact the developer directly.
