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 available 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. 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 &opie;s translationfiles and can help you by 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 CarstenNiehaus so that everything will be set up for your language.

To ensure a high quality of the translations the translatiors have to keep certain things in mind. The applications do not speak to the user. This means that for example it should not be I didn't find the file! but File not found!. Try not to use exclamationmarks. If the users sees them to often the ! looses it function as a amplifier of a warning. Don't put a space in front of a punctuation mark. So write eg "this is a demonstation!" insteadt of "this is a demonstation !".

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. The next row is where the translated string 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. It might happen that you see type="obsolete" in a .ts-file. You should not translate these stings as they do no longer appear in the application. The translationcoordinator removes those strings from time to time. In Linguist those strings are grey and not translatable.

As a translator one need to know three different filetypes. ts .ts-files are the most important files for translators. In these files are all strings which need to be translated and the translations themselfs. All .ts-files are located in OPIEDIR/i18n/xx while xx is a languagecode (eg. de or de). In theory .ts-files are the only ones a translator needs to know. pro Every application has a .pro-file from which the Makefiles are generated. As a translator you need to check if in every .pro-file is a line for the language you would to translate for. A line like this should look this way: ../../../i18n/de/today.ts \ Usually the translationcoordinator takes care of these entries so you should not need to edit them. qm These are binary files used by &opie; to display the translated strings. They are automatically generated by calling the command make lrelease. Of course, you need to have the binary of lrelease which comes with &qt;.

There are certain things that should only be done be the translationcoordinator or one of the core developers. The translationfiles should never be updated by the translators. Only the translationcoordinator updates the repository. This is to avoid merging conflicts. The binary .qm-files are created by either the translationcoordinator or by the feed-manager. Of course, the translators can created them as described above for testingpurposes but the official files will be provided. Whenever you find a typo or an incorrect message contact the author of the application and/or use our bugtrackingsystem (Mantis) to make sure this string will be fixed. If you find a string like "Form1" contact the translationcoordinator. These strings should not be in the translationfiles. You don't need to translate them. If you check you translation and see a not translated string even though you translationfile is 100% translated use the bugtrackingsystem and/or contact the author of that application directly so that this bug is fixed.