WinSCP Translation How to

When you want to start a translation, contact me. Send me your name, contact email address and the language you want to work on. Also specify, whether you want your email address to be published on the translations page. Optionally I may display your URL instead of your email. Note that I may provide your email address to other translators of the same language (if any) without explicitly asking you. In case your language does not use the 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) has been tested.

If 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 a maintainer for it), I’ll create a translator account for you. Your username is always your e-mail address.

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

Format of the file is like the INI file, for example:

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

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

Example:

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

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

There are two special sections: [default.isl] contains general strings for the setup application (Inno Setup). The application has already been 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 this section.

The [Obsolete strings] section contains translated strings that are no longer used in the latest version of the application. Also when I need to significantly change the 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 the next update. This forces you to update the string translation. You may reuse the original translation from an obsolete section, if appropriate. Then you may safely remove the whole section.

Some strings contain parameter placeholders like %s or %d. These are replaced by the actual value at run-time. Make sure that you keep the same order as in the english string. I know it can be difficult sometimes, because some languages have different word-orders, but it has to be so. Also translated strings should have approximately the same length as the 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 the & character to mark the accelerator character (the one after &). When the user presses Alt-X, where X is the accelerator character, the associated control (button, edit box, menu, etc.) receives the focus (cursor moves to it, etc.). The accelerator character should be unique for each screen (window). It can be difficult to maintain this also, as the dialogs often use strings from different sources. So you’ll probably require several attempts to get it right.

Also, please, if you encounter strange sequences like #13#10, include it in the translation too. For these strings I recommend that you to copy the English one and replace the words only, keeping the “strange” patterns. Please never use double quotes (“), use always single-quotes (’), following the way the original english string is written. Double quotes are used to mark the beginning and the end of the string.

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

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

Here I provide an explanation of the meanings of some strings (and/or usage), where it may not be obvious. I will expand the list each time someone asks. You can also add your own knowledge.

Read documentation.

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

The Project CVS can be accessed anonymously. To checkout the 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 a web-based CVS viewer. It is on a delay with respect to the primary CVS server.

More information about CVS is provided on the project page.

In addition to translating the appplication itself you are welcome to prepare a localised introduction page for the 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 a 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 the Create this page button on the right.

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

I believe that DokuWiki supports UTF-8 correctly so you should not have any problems using a particular language.

Before editing, create an account for the wiki. Firstly, you will receive some credit for your contributions. Secondly, I will be able to recognise your edits from wiki vandalism. Wiki authentication is linked to support forum, so in fact you need to register on the forum.

As a last step add your language (local name, not in English) to a list to give me a hint about the title of the language icon (flag).

Once you have created the localized version I’ll give it a shortcut address in the 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 corresponding language set as preferred.