Howto:Translate FlightGear

This feature appears to be broken with recent versions of 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 of course. 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>

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