The OPIE-Project tries to offer the support for as many languages as possible. In this chapter the process of translating OPIE and its documentation is explained.

To ensure that OPIE can be used by as many people as possible the OPIE-project aims to be translated in as many languages as possible. Of course, as there are so many different languages, there is always a lot work to do. Furthermore, OPIE evolves and thus most likely there are translations for applications which should be updated. In this tutorial you will learn how to help OPIE to be availeble in as many languages as possible and see how easy it is to give something very much respected to the open-source community.

In order to translate for OPIE you need an editor to edit the translationfile and preferably access to cvs. The preferred editor is Linguist. That is an application which comes with Qt. It has a intuitive GUI and is very easy to use. A tutorial can be found here: http://doc.trolltech.com/3.1/linguist-manual-3.html. However, you can use every editor which works with UTF8, for example VIM or EMACS. The advantage of Linguist is that its GUI is optimized for OPIEs translationfiles and can help you be proposing a translation and notice you if there is an error within the translation. CVS is a tool which the developers and most translators use to get the source of OPIE. If you already have an anonymous account for the OPIE-cvs you should go to $OPIEDIR/i18n and do cvs up. If there is already a translation for the language you would like to translate you will see the language code in that directory. For example, for german this is de and for danish it is da. If not you should contact the coordinator Carsten Niehaus so that everything will be set up for your language.

In the next paragraph you see an example of how the XML looks like. As you can see the markup is very simple. The part between two source-tags is the english text which appears if there is no translation yet. In the first case this is New. In the next row is where the translation would be. The first two messages are already translated, the third is not. This is marked by the type="unfinished". If you choose to use an editor like vim instead of the prefered tool -Linguist- you have to remove that mark and add the translated string between the two translation-tags.

There are certain things that should only be done be the translationcoordinator or one of the core developers.