I'd like to ask for ispell support for .po files. .po files are translation files as used by the gettext tools collection. Basically they contain the english message (msgid) and translation (msgstr) provided by the translator, plus comments (# ): # this is the first message #, c-format msgid "" "this is a message." msgstr "" "dies ist eine Meldung." # this is the 2nd message #, c-format msgid "" "this is the sencond message." msgstr "" "dies ist die zweite Meldung." ispell should check text after "# " (but not after "#[.,:]") and inside the field 'msgstr' only. Göran Uddeborg already came up with the appended extension to po-mode.el. I'd recommend to add something along these lines to ispell.el (as already done for 'tex). For testing more .po files you can find here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/teams/PO/