In addition to the backward compatibility, it also adds
1. Highlighting the comment of the post author
2. The CSS style definitions defined in the post Floating Images within the post in WordPress 2.6 is now part of the theme itself.
3. New and updated mistylook.pot file.Yes, the old translations may not work 100 percent and so translators have to use the new mistylook.pot file and recreate their .mo files. Special Thanks to Henrik for recreating the .pot file.

So Volunteers, If you have done translation of the MistyLook theme, please send me the new version of your .mo files so I can host them along with the theme. Thanks.

Updated the comments.php and mistylook.pot file with the help by Ulli. New version 3.7.2 just released today [February 10th 2009]

Also read
What it takes to internationalize a theme?

Fully Internationalized for easy translation
Well, as I was telling you about “What it takes to internationalize a theme?“, I mentioned about Henrik’s work on the version 3.5 of the MistyLook theme. I took his work as a basis for the new version and so 3.6 of MistyLook is fully internationalized for easy translation to any language.

Support for Gravatar
As WordPress 2.5 supports Gravatar by default, I took the time to add the necessary code to the comments.php and the style.css file to natively support Gravatar when used with WordPress 2.5.
The theme would still work fine in previous versions of WordPress as well.

Footer Links
This theme is no longer a sponsored theme, but it has two links in the footer.
One for the theme link at wpthemes.info and the other link pointed to wprocks.com [the website you are reading right now]. The License Info for the theme remains the same.

Support for other Languages
Danish Translation file, done by Henrik, is ready as of now. I still need volunteers for creating language specific .MO files for other languages. Please get in touch with us, if you can help us in this endeavor.

Download
Go ahead and download it right from the
theme page at wpthemes.info

Henrik from http://henrik.schack.dk/ recently contacted me asking me if it is OK to release the Danish version of MistyLook that he worked on.

I had a little chat with him over the email and this is what I learned.

Step 1: Prepare your WordPress Theme:
You have to wrap all your text within the theme, inside a

<?php _e('some text goes here', 'ml') ?>

It means if you want the sidebar’s heading to have

<h3>Pages</h3>

you should actually be coding it as

<h3><?php _e('Pages','ml'); ?></h3>.

You should do this everywhere the theme emits any text.

Next thing we have to do is, add a line in the functions.php.

<?php load_theme_textdomain('ml'); ?>

where ‘ml’ is the short form of the theme name ‘MistyLook’.

Step 2: Create a .POT file
The next step is to create a .POT file. This file is the catalog of all the places in the theme files, that we want the text to be translated.
something like

#: archive.php:36 search.php:19
msgid "Read Full Post »"
msgstr ""

which specifies the line number 36 in the archive.php file and the line number 19 in the search.php has the text “Read Full Post »” which needs to be translated.
Similarly it has entries for each of the text items that has to be translated.

Step 3 : Translating the theme
This .POT file we created in the previous step, is the starting point for our translation effort.
Now somebody has to say if it is “Permanent Link” in english, it is called “Lien Permanent” in french or “Eslabón Permanente” in Spanish [I just used an online translator for arriving at this text].
So if somebody wants to translate the theme to Spanish, they will simply load the .POT file that we have for the theme into a software like PO Edit and enter the equivalent Spanish strings for each of the English string we have provided.
From this tool, we can generate a .MO file for Spanish translation or a .MO file for French etc.
Once a .MO file is created, it should be placed within the theme folder.

How does WordPress know to apply this .MO file?
Ok. We have a .MO file which contains the translated text for German, for example.
but for the WordPress to load this file, you need to change the wp-config.php file.
Look for

define ('WPLANG', '');

and change it to

define ('WPLANG', 'de');


This is for when you have a German Translated file. If your language is different, you should use your language code instead of ‘de’.

Thats it.
If a language file is found, then it will be used or otherwise it will use the text in English.

[This article is a draft of what I have understood so far, about making the theme ready for translation. As I learn more, I will update this post.
First Posted on : April 01 2008.
]