TranslatingPHD2 - OpenPHDGuiding/phd2 GitHub Wiki

Translating the PHD2 User Interface

Translating PHD2 into different languages is a simple process.

First you will need a translation editor. Poedit is an excellent free tool, and there are several other choices available too.

Starting a new translation

To translate PHD2 into a new language:

  1. Download the messages template file from the phd2 source repository: messages.pot.
  2. In Poedit, select "Start a new translation", and open the messages.pot file you just downloaded.
  3. Save your work as messages.po.

Updating an existing translation

  1. Get the messages.po file for your language from the phd2 source repository in the locale folder. Browse to the language sub-folder for your language and click on messages.po. Use the Raw button on the top right side of the page to save messages.po to your computer.
  2. Open the messages.po file in Poedit

Viewing the translation in PHD2

When you save messages.po, Poedit will create messages.mo in the same folder. Copy messages.mo to your phd2 install folder

    <PHD2_Install_Folder>/locale/<YOUR_LANGUAGE_ABBREV>/messages.mo

Then, restart phd2 to see the updated translation.

Publishing the translation

Email the messages.po file to [email protected], or post a message on the google group with messages.po as an attachment. We will commit the file to the PHD2 source repository, and the updated translation will become available in the next development build of PHD2.

Translating the PHD2 User Manual

The PHD2 User Manual is available from the Help menu in PHD2. The User Manual is also rendered as a PDF file, and as HTML pages on the PHD2 web site. All three of these formats are derived (generated) from a collection of HTML files and images in the the PHD2 github code repository.

Starting a new User Manual translation

Start by downloading the English user manual files to your PC. The English files are in the help folder of the PHD2 source code repository. There are various ways to get the help files onto your PC. Probably the easiest way is to download the full github repo source tree - Download ZIP, then extract just the help folder from the ZIP file.

Once you have a copy of the help files, you can make the necessary modifications to the html files using a text editor. .png images can be replaced with versions more suitable to the translation language.

There are two configuration files required for the help generator

  • PHD2GuideHelp.hhp is the main configuration file. Be sure to update the list of html files if you add, remove, or rename any of the files.
  • PHD2GuideHelp.hhc defines the Table of Contents. Edit this file as necessary to define the Table of Contents.

Help Files Format details: wxHTML

Once the translation is ready, zip the help folder and send it to the PHD2 developers as described above.

Updating an existing User Manual translation

User Manual translations are located in the PHD2 repository under the locale/<language_abbreviation>/help folder. For example, the French User manual is at locale/fr_FR/help

To update existing User Manual help files, you can download the PHD2 repository ZIP, make the modifications, then send the updated files to the developers. Or, if you are familiar with github, you can make changes directly in the github UI, or you can fork the repository and send a Pull Request.

Notes for developers

If you make a change that affects translatable strings (strings added, removed, or modified), please run build/locales_update.sh to update the messages.po files for translators.

After receiving an updated messages.po file from translators, run build/locales_compile.sh to update the messages.mo files.