The required tools depends on the Operating System. Linux is recommended, although several members of the documentation team uses Windows. All members require the following to commit:
The basic process is to check out (~download) a file (or entire SVN module) using the SVN client, edit the file, configure and validate the file, review the diff/patch, and finally commit (~upload) the file to the server. Building and viewing the file locally before commit is also an option.
Note that the different translation projects use different encodings, so to work with these the text editor must support these encodings. Although the English documentation often uses ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), it also uses UTF-8 so the text editor should understand UTF-8. Most do.
Testing modifications takes a little time to get used to but after awhile it becomes natural. See the configuration and validation chapter for more information.