[Bf-committers] Localization

Dave Stone dave.stone at usermail.com
Wed Nov 24 15:54:48 CET 2004


Hi Enzo,

I took this on some months ago, and after a fairly enthusiastic beginning 
ran into a lot of apathy from the translators. Which is apparently what 
happened to the previous person who took it on (that and I ended up in the 
hospital for a while).

It's a fairly straightforward process to translate. There's are language 
files, one for each language. There is a 'msgid' line with the text in 
English followed by a 'msgstr' line with the translated text. All you need 
to do is to take one of the language files and replace the non-English text 
with your non-English text. After that it gets compiled and placed into a 
language specific directory. When you switch languages in Blender it causes 
Blender to look for the language file in that particular directory.

I have the language files on my website, or you can get them from the 
Blender CVS directory. I suggest starting with the Russian or Italian 
files. They are more complete than any of the others (unless someone's been 
doing a lot of work with another one) and the Russian file is very well 
organized.

Files are of the name XX.po, where 'XX' is the two letter country code. For 
Russian this would be 'ru.po', and Italian is 'it.po'. You can edit these 
with any text editor, but I suggest searching the web for a copy of POEDIT. 
This is an application for editing .po files and also runs the compiler 
(note: you may have to download the compiler separately). The files need to 
be compiled into a file called 'blender.mo' and placed into the 
.blender/locale/XX/LC_MESSAGES directory, where 'XX' is the same two letter 
abbreviation.

The Russian file has 4145 message IDs for Blender 2.33. Hopefully someone 
has at least updated the English language file to have all of the new text 
strings as well. However, the default is that if an translation file 
doesn't exist, or if the text to be translated can't be found in the 
translation file then the English text is displayed, so it's easy to forget 
to update the language files if you speak English.

Hope this helps.

Dave S.

At 07:32 AM 11/24/2004, you wrote:
>Hi guys,
>
>Just subscribed to the list to get some info on localization of
>Blender (am I in the right place?)
>
>What's the status on localizing Blender? Are systems in place to allow
>localization? Is there a management team?
>
>How many strings are involved, what format the relevant files, and
>where does one start??
>
>
>
>Any relevant info greatly appreciated!
>
>Enzo
>_______________________________________________
>Bf-committers mailing list
>Bf-committers at projects.blender.org
>http://projects.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers




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