Hello,
I am wondering about Localization good practices.
Documentation exists:
- Chapter 18. Localization (by Yen-Ju Chen) at:
https://www.nongnu.org/gstutorial/en/ch18.html
- Chapter 7. Language support Localization (by Yen-Ju Chen and Dennis
Leeuw) at:
http://gnustep.made-it.com/GSPT/xml/Tutorial_en.html
- Within Renaissance and I guess only for Apps made with it:
https://deepwiki.com/gnustep/libs-renaissance/7.2-localization-tools
When we think about translation, we have three major things to deal
with:
1- UI of each app installed on the system
2- Services (menu items only?)
3- Help Resources.
Do I forget something?
1- About UI
What seems needed:
a- Moving .gorm files to English.lproj;
b- Generating Localizable.strings within Gorm;
c- Adapting the path in GNUMakefile like this:
AppName_RESOURCE_FILES = \
English.lproj/MainMenu.gorm
d- Copying English.loproj for example to French.lproj;
e- cd in French.lproj and Translating each right fields in
Localizable.strings;
f- Editing each French .gorm file with Gorm and importing the
translated Localizable.strings;
g- Maybe adapting the UI due to the length of some text tags.
h- Adapting GNUMakefile to handle the new language implemented like
this:
AppName_RESOURCE_FILES = \
English.lproj/MainMenu.gorm \
French.lproj/MainMenu.gorm
(...)
AppName_LANGUAGES = English French
AppName_LOCALIZED_RESOURCE_FILES = \
Localizable.strings \
MainMenu.gorm
i- Making and testing the UI in the language context targetted.
Well, it is working (recently tested on StepSync)
- I am guessing about the steps "a, f-g", because, while studying the
GWorkspace organization, I noted there were only 'Localizable.strings'
in the '*.lproj' folders. But without .gorm tranlated, I was not able
to achieve a working L18N on my real example (StepSync).
2- Services
- How to translate services too?
I don't know how to do this.
3- About Help Resources
a- Moving AppName.help into English.lproj;
b- Copying AppName.help into French.lproj;
c- Tranlating the contents of AppName.help to French.
d- Adapting the path in GNUMakefile like this:
AppName_RESOURCE_FILES = \
English.lproj/MainMenu.gorm \
French.lproj/MainMenu.gorm \
English.lproj/AppName.help \
French.lproj/AppName.help
(...)
AppName_LOCALIZED_RESOURCE_FILES = \
Localizable.strings \
MainMenu.gorm \
AppName.help
e- Building and testing the menu command "Help...".
While the app is in French, the help shown was still in English.
It seems that the relevant property in Info.plist is not concerned yet
by L18N:
GSHelpContentsFile = "AppName.help";
- So I guess We must go into this in depth.
Regards,
Patrick
--
Patrick Cardona - Pi400 - GNU/Linux aarch64 (Debian 13.1)
Xorg (1:7.7+24) - libcairo2 (1.18.4-1+rpt1 arm64)
Window Maker (0.96.0) - GWorkspace (1.1.0 - 02 2025) - Theme: AGNOSTEP
- MUA: GNUMail (1.4.0)
