README for KDiff3-Internationalisation (i18n) ============================================= Author: Joachim Eibl 2004 This text is for you, if you might want to help translating KDiff3 or just want to learn how this i18n-thing works. grep "Language-Team" *.po az Azerbaijani ca LANGUAGE da Danish de Deutsch en_GB British English es espaniol et Estonian fr French hu Hungarian it Italian nl Nederlands pl Polish pt_BR Brazilian Portuguese pt Portuguese ro Romanian ru Russian sr Serbian sv Svenska ta tr Türkçe zh_CN zh_CN Thanks to all translators! The program was written with English as main language. But to allow automatic translation of messages, every translatable text in the program was written as i18n("translatable"). i18n() is a translator-function. If a translation table exists, at runtime the function looks for the given string in that table and returns the translation. The translation-table is created in 3 steps: 1. First a template-translation table kdiff3.pot should be created: Usually via xgettext --keyword=i18n --keyword=I18N_NOOP -C -o ../po/kdiff3.pot *.cpp *.h It contains all translatable strings of the program, but no translations. (xgettext is usually part of package gettext-devel) 2. Translators create a translation for a specific language. Because we don't want to modify the template now, we'll create a copy for each language. e.g.: cp kdiff3.pot de.po Using KBabel we can comfortably edit the translated strings. e.g.: kbabel de.po 3. The last step is to create a fast lookup-table (*.gmo) from the po-file via msgfmt, but this happens automatically during the build process. (If a new po-file was added: make -f Makefile.cvs; configure; make) Before starting to translate make sure nobody else is already doing it. It would be a pity, if your precious time is wasted. Look at http://i18n.kde.org/, send a message to the translation team coordinator for your language, and tell them that you want to translate KDiff3. He'll inform you if you should proceed. Also read the other docs on that site. ============ The following is for my own memory and for those who really want to learn dirty tricks and details: The KDE-i18n team stores their results in SVN. But I would like to have an independent copy of all translations in the po-directory of the source package. Actually it's just copying and renaming, but simplified with these commands: First fetch all available translations from the SVN-repository (access via websvn and wget) wget http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/l10n/subdirs for i in `cat subdirs`; do wget http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/l10n/$i/messages/extragear-utils/kdiff3.po -O $i.po; done This was the explanation for translations within KDE. But KDiff3 can also be compiled and run without KDE: Since Qt was used for KDiff3, the first part is quite the same: Only the fast lookup-table (*.qm-files) must be created with $QTDIR/bin/msg2qm (instead of msgfmt). ($QTDIR/tools/msg2qm) Still one detail isn't right: Some strings are not translated, because under KDE their translation is within KDE-libs or within Qt. But the translations are available: For Qt-strings in $QTDIR/translations (already as .qm-files) For KDE-libs in the SVN-repository, where we can reuse the previous trick to get all tdelibs*.po-files: for i in `cat subdirs`; do wget http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/l10n/$i/messages/tdelibs/tdelibs.po -O tdelibs_$i.po; done Finally the program must only read the correct translation tables: QTranslator kdiff3Translator( 0 ); kdiff3Translator.load( QString("kdiff3_")+QTextCodec::locale(), translationDir ); app.installTranslator( &kdiff3Translator ); QTranslator qtTranslator( 0 ); qtTranslator.load( QString("qt_")+QTextCodec::locale(), translationDir ); app.installTranslator( &qtTranslator ); QTranslator tdelibsTranslator( 0 ); tdelibsTranslator.load( QString("tdelibs_")+QTextCodec::locale(), translationDir ); app.installTranslator( &tdelibsTranslator ); This should do the job, if the translation-tables can be found. The difficult part is: Where to search for the files, because this depends on where the program was installed. (I didn't solve this puzzle yet.) Because it's too much effort to copy all tdelibs*.po-files along: Here is a little info about how to extract only the needed strings and to create the qm-files. 1. Only src/kreplacements/kreplacements.cpp contains strings, that were not covered by the normal translations. Hence a special pot-file is needed. xgettext --keyword=i18n --keyword=I18N_NOOP -C ../src/kreplacements/kreplacements.cpp -o kreplacements.pot (xgettext is usually part of package gettext-devel) 2. Take only needed strings and translations from tdelibs*.po: msgmerge --no-fuzzy-matching tdelibs_de.po kreplacements.pot >kreplacements_de.po 3. Concatenate the normal de.po and kreplacements_de.po: msgcat --use-first de.po kreplacements_de.po >kdiff3_de.po 4. Finally create the fast lookup table: $QTDIR/bin/msg2qm kdiff3_de.po kdiff3_de.qm 5. The intermediate files can then be deleted. The script createqm does steps 2-5 for languages where a kdiff3.po-translation exists.