This guide is supposed to be a first start for translators. There are probably errors. Please tell me if you find any. Thank you.
If you are interested in translating LenMus to your own language, I'd be happy to include your translation. But I would expect that you continue doing it for the coming LenMus versions, at least for some time. It would be frustrating for users to find LenMus in their native language in one release and not to find it updated in next version. And for you, once a translation exists, translating a new version of the program generally requires just a couple of hours to translate the new strings added or changed, as the other information rarely changes.
There is a list with the status of current translations, so you can check if your language is already included and/or it needs to be updated.
The steps to do are the following:
Thank you in advance for your help!
LenMus executable translations are based on PO files. PO files are text files which have original English strings and translated strings listed together.
To fully translate LenMus you will have to translate several files:
To include a translation into LenMus, at least the first three files must be translated (lenmus.pot, wxmidi.pot, GeneralExercises.pot).
In the LenMus project your translation work will be acknowledged in the following ways:
Translating documentation is not very difficult in itself. It is relatively simple to do a translation when you have to translate everything. The difficult part comes when you have to maintain your work. Detecting which parts did change and need to be updated is tiring, error-prone and highly unpleasant.
Think about a typical review scenario for a translator:
Steps 1 to 3 are tedious and unpleasant. But the good news are that the computer can do it for you!. There are tools that helps to re-use the previous translations and to spot needed changes.
LenMus software is written with the wxWidgets application framework and follows wxWidgets approach to internationalization. This approach closely follows the GNU gettext package, based on using plain files 'message catalogues' ( PO files) containing the strings to translate.
PO files are plain text, so you can even translate them using a normal text editor, although I strongly un-recommend this option. The task is more comfortable and less error prone if you use a specific tool. There is a wide range of tools out there that can handle and manipulate PO files. I recommend that you use poEdit on Windows and Linux, or KBabel on Linux.
File 'study-guide.htm' is an HTML page containing a guide for students about how to use LenMusand post you any available additional information, if it exists. By knowing that you are going to do a new translation I will have also time to review the files to translate, if needed, to ensure that you start with the good ones! program. In case you don't have much experience with computers and HTML files you should know that you can open the study-guide.htm just with double click with the mouse. The file will be displayed in the internet web browser. For translation, perhaps the simplest way to proceed is just to open the file in the web browser, copy and paste the text in a text editor (i.e. Word), and translate the text. Send me back the translated text in any format (.doc, .txt , ..). Don't worry about HTML. I will convert your translated text to HTML.
Open an issue in LenMus repo at GitHub informing about the new translation you are going to do. I will acknowledge your message and post you any available additional information, if it exists. By knowing that you are going to do a new translation I will have also time to review the files to translate, if needed, to ensure that you start with the good ones!
In LenMus, both the program strings and the books content are translated by using PO files. There is a PO file for each book and two additional PO files for program strings. You will find all the necessary files in the language pack containing all the PO files to translate.
Package "pack_n.n_xx.zip" is used for new translations. It contains POT files instead of PO files. Both are practically the same. POT files are basically the template files for PO files, with all the translations empty.
Please do the following:
If you have any problem with the download, then please post a message to the translation issue you open at LenMus repo and I will send the file to you.
When unzipping the language pack you will find the following content:
The name of program PO files must include the ISO 639-1 code for the language. So first thing to do is to change its name by adding the language suffix '_xx' ['xx' must be the ISO code of the new language (use lower case, please)] and changing the POT extension to PO. For example, assuming your are translating lenmus to Spanish (ISO language code 'es') you should change '.pot' by '_es.pot', thus 'lenmus.pot' will be renamed as 'lenmus_es.po'. A list of ISO 639-1 language codes can be found here .
In certain languages there are variations from one country to another. In these cases, you can add two more characters (upper case) to specify the country. For example, language code '_es_ES' refers to the Spanish language spoken in Spain, and '_es_AR' refers to the Spanish language spoken in Argentina. This two letter country code is the ISO 3166 country code. It must be upper case.
But let's be practical. It is better to have as few translations as possible that cover as many languages as possible. Please keep in mind that maintaining a translation involves a lot of work. I would not be very happy at having to maintain a (de_CH) Swiss German, (de_AT) Austrian German and (de_DE) German German translation, unless there are truly committed translators to keep these translations alive. But if it's really necessary because the local variations are really important, sure go ahead.
Now translate each .po file and provide a translation for each string using poEdit. If you are not sure with one or the other translation, mark it as fuzzy. You can enter a comment in poEdit to give some information about your thoughts to other translators. If you are not sure about the meaning of the original sentence post a message to the translation issue you open at LenMus repo and I will give you more information.
To include a translation into the next LenMus release, at least the following files must be translated:
The first one (lenmus.pot) is the longest and the two last ones are very short. I recommend you not to start translating files:
until the previous ones are ready.
File wxmidi.pot contains, mainly, the names of the 128 standard MIDI musical instruments. Probably you will be able to find somewhere, in Internet, this list in your language. This would save you some time in translation.
In strings to be translated you will find characters that have special meaning. Watch out for the following:
For any problem you might have, please post a message to the translation issue you open at LenMus repo. Please, do not just leave the problem unmentioned. Thank you.
When you are finished, send me your translated files. I will review your translation; if there are problems, I will contact you to get them resolved. When everything is working your translation will be committed to the source code repository. From that moment on, your language will be available in the development repository for testing. And it will become part of the next official release. I will also put your name on the list of contributors.
When the next release is approaching, I notify you to give you a chance to update the translation with any new/changed strings.
If you need further assistance, feel free to ask for help by opening an issue in LenMus repo at GitHub.
Thank you in advance for your help and for helping others to use LenMus.
Last updated: 2019/06/20
LenMus