Translating Platform Theme

Hi all,
I’ve mounted the Platform theme on the website on which I’m working.
I’ve already added the translation in Italian of WordPress but now I need to translate the theme. I saw the files platform.mo and platform.po in the language dir of the theme folder, but I don’t know how to use it.

This is the start of the .po file:

msgid “”
msgstr “”
“Project-Id-Version: Platform\n”
“Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n”
“POT-Creation-Date: 2010-09-16 12:12-0800\n”
“PO-Revision-Date: 2010-09-16 12:14-0800\n”
“Last-Translator: Adam <cadammunns@gmail.com>\n”
“Language-Team: PageLines <hello@pagelines.com>\n”
“MIME-Version: 1.0\n”
“Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n”
“Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n”
“X-Poedit-KeywordsList: _;gettext;gettext_noop;__;_e;_n\n”
“X-Poedit-Basepath: .\n”
“X-Poedit-Language: English\n”
“X-Poedit-Country: UNITED STATES\n”
“X-Poedit-SearchPath-0: .\n”

#: comments.php:12
msgid “This post is password protected. Enter the password to view any comments.”
msgstr “”

#: comments.php:25
#, php-format
msgid “One Response to %2$s”
msgstr “”

I know that I have to fill the fields msgstr with the translation, but:
– do I have to rename the file?
– how to generate the relative .mo file?
– nothing else to do?

Thanks to anyone that replies