Translating Icestudio
Icestudio is available in different languages. Please, help us with the translations. Contributions are very welcome! 😀️
The base language is English. The translations from English to other languages are located in this folder:
If you want to translate into your mother tongue (or update the current translation), follow these steps:
The first step is to extract the latest English text to be translated. It is done by executing the following command:
npm run preptext
It will update the template file: app/resources/locale/template.pot. It contains all the English texts ready for being imported into the poedit and translated into your language. it also runs scripts/update_translations.sh, to update the existing *.po language files so they are synched to the template
Note
for Windows, use npm config set script-shell "C:\\Program Files\\Git\\bin\\bash.exe" or equivalent so the postinstall script can run during npm install
Note
for Windows, if commands msgmerge, msgfmt are not found while executing update_translations.sh, then they weren't installed with MSYS2/Git Bash; a Windows binary installer for GNU gettext utils will take care of this: https://mlocati.github.io/articles/gettext-iconv-windows.html; download the "static" flavor for 64bit Windows; include it in PATH (done in an install step)
The .po files contains the translations to the different languages. They are located under the corresponding locale folder: app/resources/locale. There is one folder per locale. For example, for the spanish language (from spain) the .po file is located in the folder: app/resources/locale/es_ES
Use the POEDIT to open the .po file
From the POEDIT, use the menu option Translation/Update from POT file... for merging the updated .pot file into your translations
Using the POEDIT you can easily translate the English texts into your language. Once you are ready save the .po file. You can now emit a pull request with your translation
What happens with the .po files with the translations? Icestudio does not read the .po files directly. When the Icestudio executable file is created, the .po files are compiled into .json files (For example, the es_ES.po files is converted into es_ES.json files). These .json files are read by Icestudio during the start up (only the file corresponding to the current selected language)
The compilation from .po to .json can be done by the developers using the command:
npm run compiletext
