Looking at the SlackBuild, Pat builds wicd without pybabel (which I assume is a combination of babel and pytz, but I'm too lazy to research that) by using a patch and for loop.
Code:
# Bypass the need for pybabel (thanks, dapal!)
zcat $CWD/manually-compile-translations.diff.gz | patch -p1 || exit 1
for pofile in $(find po/ -type f -name "*.po") ; do
mkdir -p translations/$(basename ${pofile} .po)/LC_MESSAGES
msgfmt -o translations/$(basename ${pofile} .po)/LC_MESSAGES/wicd.mo ${pofile}
done
The patch removes a few sections from the setup.py file that compiles translations and then does them using the for loop.
After running that patch and for loop, you should be able to compile wicd using the following (assuming you're running 64bit, otherwise remove the 64 from the two lib dirs). You could also remove the kde section if you want, but it shouldn't matter even if you don't have kde installed. However, Pat also applies two other patches, wicd-1421918.patch.gz and curses_bitrate_fix.patch.gz, both of which could affect your usage of wicd once it's compiled, so I'd recommend using those patches. They're available on the link Alien Bob provided and the patch commands are in the SlackBuild.
Code:
python setup.py configure \
--lib=/usr/lib64/wicd \
--kdedir=/usr/share/autostart \
--backends=/usr/lib64/wicd/backends \
--no-install-gnome-shell-extensions
python setup.py install
---or--
python setup.py install --root=$PKG # if you want to install it to a temporary directory to create a Slackware package
Reading through the SlackBuild provides you everything you need to do to compile wicd on Slackware. pybabel usage has not been tested on Slackware since wicd is specifically patched to not use that, so if you insist to go that route, I couldn't tell you whether it is going to work or not.
But, considering you're only a few weeks into Linux, personally, I wouldn't jump this deep into compiling software (trying to get pybabel working on wicd on Slackware when it's been pretty much untested and specifically patched out of the official package) until you have a good feel for how it all works. If you do still want to pursue this, we can try to help, but you need to give us more information, like the output of your commands when they fail. We can't do much with vague wording without error messages.
Long story short, when there's a SlackBuild available, it is almost always recommended to use that to build software unless you're specifically trying to enable something that isn't default. But even then, you can usually just modify the SlackBuild to suit your purposes rather than starting over from scratch and reinventing the wheel.
