Howto:Translate FlightGear

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Note

Note that the new translation infrastructure will be based on the XLIFF 1.2 format (*.xlf files in [1], the French file is complete). These files can be translated with Qt Linguist, which is much more convenient than the old (current) system, especially to detect new strings and strings which have changed since they were last translated. However, the C++ code to use the XLIFF files in FlightGear is not quite ready. It's okay if the translation is made in the old format for now, we have a script to convert it, cf. fg-convert-translation-files at [2].[1]

References
  1. Florent Rougon  (Oct 11th, 2017).  Re: [Flightgear-devel] Translating the Flight Gear .

FlightGear supports localization, that is, showing the user interface in the user's native language rather than in English. At the time of writing (June 2017), not all parts of the simulator are localized, but efforts are underway to make it so.

This page will help you translate FlightGear to a new language or improve the existing translations.

What can be translated

The following parts of the simulator can be translated:

  • the menus, splash screens, startup tips and the text shown when the --help command-line option is used (FlightGear 2.7.0 and later);
  • the shortcut file on Linux systems (FlightGear 2017.1 and later);
  • the man pages (FlightGear 2017.3 and later).

How to translate the interface

  1. Determine the two letter ISO 639-1 language code for the language you want to translate FlightGear to. A list can be found on the Library of Congress Web site.
  2. Check whether your language already has a subdirectory below the Translations directory. If it does not, create an empty directory in it named after the language code, then download the latest English resources and copy the files to the directory of your language.
  3. Open the XML files in the subdirectory of your language and translate the English strings in them. Do not translate the filenames and do not change the order, structure or indentation of the XML files (this helps with future maintenance when the language resources need to be updated for another FlightGear version).
  4. Start FlightGear to test your translation. By default, the simulator will select the locale of your operating system as the language to use; you can explicitly select a language using the command-line option --language=language code.

Note that the user interface might have not full Unicode support (some special/accented characters might not be shown): should you encounter such a location, please write to the flightgear-devel mailing list at flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.

How to translate the shortcut file

Open the FlightGear .desktop file and translate the GenericName, Comment and Keywords keys (add the GenericName[xx], Comment[xx] and Keywords[xx] keys, where xx is the two letter ISO 639-1 code of the language).

How to translate the man pages

  1. Determine the two letter ISO 639-1 language code for the language you want to translate the man pages to.
  2. Check whether your language already has a subdirectory below the man pages directory. If it does not, create an empty directory in it named after the language code, then copy man1 and man5 from the man pages directory to the directory of your language.
  3. Edit man/CMakeLists.txt and add the instruction add_subdirectory(xx) in the if(NOT WIN32) block (where xx is the language code).
  4. Edit man/xx/man1/CMakeLists.txt and man/xx/man5/CMakeLists.txt: on the last row, set the installation directory (DESTINATION), respectively, to ${CMAKE_INSTALL_MANDIR}/xx/man1 and ${CMAKE_INSTALL_MANDIR}/xx/man5.
  5. Open the man pages in the subdirectory of your language and translate them.

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