Howto:Translate FlightGear

This howto explains translating FlightGear's menus and messages to your language.

Flightgear has bad I18N (internationalization) support. More information at: http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05761.html

WARNING: You can only use ASCII characters for translating strings in your language.

The How to

1. You need to have FlightGear installed on your computer ofcourse. For example: FlightGear on Windows is in the directory: C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0. Strings to translate are between the XML tags <label> and <legend>.
2. You need to translate the english strings in the xml file C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0\data\gui\menubar.xml. For example, in the file menubar.xml, the english text string <label>Save</label> will become <label>Sauvegarder</label> in French.
3. You need to translate the english strings in the xml files that are in the directory C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0\data\gui\dialogs
   • Create a copy of the file C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0\data\Translations\strings-default.xml in the directory C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0\data\Translations.
   • Rename the copy of the file strings-default.xml with a new name like strings-language_code.xml where language_code is the international code for your language. For example , fr for french or de for German.
4. Translate all the English text strings in your strings-language_code.xml file in your language.
5. Edit the file C:\Program Files\FlightGear-1.0.0\data\Translations\locale.xml and add the section for your language:

<locale>
<lang type="string">language_code</lang>
<lang type="string">language_code.character_set</lang>
<strings>Translations/strings-language_code.xml</strings>
</locale>

For example, in german, you have this :

<locale>
<lang type="string">de</lang>
<lang type="string">de_AT</lang>
<lang type="string">de_CH</lang>
<lang type="string">de_AT.ISO8859-15</lang>
<lang type="string">de_DE.ISO8859-15</lang>
<lang type="string">de_CH.ISO8859-15</lang>
<strings>Translations/strings-de.xml</strings>
</locale>

Related content

• Howto: Translate FlightGear Launch Control‎‎