WinSCP Translation How to

When you want to start with translation, contact me. Send me your name, contact email address and language you want to work on. Also specify, whether you want your email address to be published on translations page. Optionally I may display your URL instead of an email. Note that I can provide your email address to other translators of the same language (if any) without explicitly asking. In case your language does not use western Latin-1 character set (1252), write me also Windows (not ISO) code of the set.

Note that support for multi-byte character sets is limited (Japanese, Chinese). It needs to be verified for each and every language. Support for bi-directional languages (Hebrew, Arabic) is tested.

In case I need your help (the language is either not being translated at all or there is still lot of work to do on it or the translation is abanoned and I need maintainer for it), I’ll create a translator account for you. An username is always your e-mail address.

Once you have a translator account, you may login to translation web-interface. There select your language. Before you will be also to download INI file with strings to translate, you may need to press Update button. If the INI file for the language does not exists yet, it will be created. If it already exists, it will get updated, in case it does not contain all strings from the most recent version yet. This can happen if the last translator abanoned the translation while ago. You may need to press Update button also with every new release.

Format of the file is like INI file, example:

; file comment
[file]
; "original english string"
key="translated string"
; "original english string2"
key2="translated string2"

Where file is either form (dialog) definition (.dfm extension), resource strings file (.rc extension) or strings for setup application (.isl extension). Key should give you some idea about purpose of the string. For form definitions it is context and the name of component using the string. The strings that need to be translated have keyword <translate> in place of “translated string” (initially all strings).

Example:

[Login.dfm]
MainPanel.PageControl.ScpSheet.ShellGroup.Caption="Shell"

The “Shell” is title (caption) of shell group box on SCP tab of Login dialog.

There are two special sections. [default.isl] contains general strings for setup application (Inno Setup). The application is already translated to several languages. If your language is among them, I’ll copy the translation to this section. Please check for typos and other mistakes in the section.

[Obsolete strings] section contains translated strings that are no longer used in the latest version of application. Also when I need to significantly change original english string, I try to change the string key as well, if possible. In this case your translation will move to [Obsolete strings] with next update. This forces you to update the string translation. You may reuse original translation from obsolete section, if appropriate. Then you may safely remove whole section.

Some strings contain parameter placeholders like %s or %d. These are replaced by actual value on run-time. Make sure that you keep the same order as in english string. I know it can be sometime difficult, because some languages have different word-ordering, but it have to be so. Also translated string should have approximately same length as original string. This applies mainly for strings that appear on dialogs. The error messages etc, might be usually as long as necessary.

Some strings use & character to mark accelerator character (the one after &). When user presses Alt-X, where X is the accelerator character, associated control (button, edit box, menu, etc.) receives focus (cursor moves to it, etc.). The accelerator character should be unique on each screen (window). It is also difficult to maitain this, as the dialogs use often strings from different sources. So you’ll probably succeed with this after several tries.

Also please, if you encounter strange sequence like #13#10, include it in translation too. For such strings I recommend you to copy the English one and replace the words only, keep the “strange” patterns. Avoid ever using double quotes (“), use always single-quotes (’), in this just follow the way the original english string is written. Double quotes are used to mark begin and end of the string.

In section [TextsWin1.rc], the first string has key TRANSLATOR_INFO. This string will appear on About dialog. You may enter there anything you want. Like ”Transation © 2005 Your name“, or whatever you want.

You do not have to translate all strings at once. You may translate several hundreds each turn. Upload, what you have done to translation web-interface. I’ll do regular updates of translation DLLs.

Here I provide explanation of some string meaning (and/or usage), where it may not be not obvious. I will expand the list each time someone asks. You also add your experiences youself.

Read documentation.

Each page includes description of its features. If you consider it to be insufficient, let me know, I’ll improve it.

Translations are stored on project CVS as well. CVS is updated in regular intervals (every few hours).

Project CVS can be accessed anonymously. To checkout whole translations module use following command (press Enter if you are prompted for password):

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/winscp co translations

There is also web-based CVS viewer. It is delayed after primary CVS server.

More information about CVS is provided on project page.

In addition to translating appplication itself you are welcome to prepare localised introduction page for WinSCP documentation.

For a start there is simple template (in English) covering the very basic information about WinSCP. However you are welcome to go more into details. Also if you know of or maintain personally site in your language about WinSCP, you are welcome to link it.

To create the translated introduction page type URL http://winscp.net/eng/docs/lang:<lang> where <lang> is your language ID (i.e. extension of the translation DLL) and press Create this page button on the right.

To start you may copy source of the template page (open it, press Edit this page and copy the content). But remove the NOINDEX/NOCACHE directive (prevents search engines indexing the template) and all footnotes (in double rounded-brackets).

I hope that DokuWiki supports UTF-8 correctly so you should not have problem using any language.

You may want to create account for wiki first to get credit for your contribution. Wiki authentication is linked to support forum, so in fact you need to register on the forum.

As a last step add you language to a list to give me hint about title of the language icon (flag).

Once you create the localized version I’ll give it shortcut address in form http://winscp.net/<lang>/ and add the ”flag" link to the page header. Also address http://winscp.net/ will automatically redirect to the localized page, if browser/visitor has the respective language set as preferred.