Smokeview Other Languages - firemodels/fds GitHub Wiki

Setting up Smokeview to use other languages

Introduction

Much of the text Smokeview outputs in menus and dialog boxes is contained in separate files, one file for each language. A typical file is named smokeview_xx.po where xx is the country code (fr for French, de for German etc). Human expertise is required to translate english to the language of choice (the web based translor which created a first version is no longer available).

Viewing Translated Smokeview Menus

To make the language preference persist across Smokeview uses, define the environment variable LANG to point to the language desired, de for German, fr for French etc. or save an .ini file. You can also type

smokeview -lang xx casename

at a command line where xx is again de for German, fr for French etc.

Presently there are language files for French and German.

  • French - smokeview_fr.po
  • German - smokeview_de.po
  • blank template - smokeview_template.po - used to create initial versions of smokeview_xx.po files and to update existing ones.

These smokeview_xx.po files are located in the FDS/Smokeview installation directory and in the FDS/Smokeview repository in the SMV/for_bundle directory.

.po File Format

.po files contain a series of string pairs as in

MSGID "english word or phrase"
MSGSTR "translation"

Limitations

One important limitation is that translated text works best when using a roman alphabet. In other words, letters from the alphabet a->z, A-Z . This is due to a limitation of the libraries used to display text in Smokeview. Some other characters may also work such as â, ê, î, ô, û or à, è, ù .

Unfortunately at present, this means that Oriental languages are not well suited for this procedure (unless there exists a system for translating text using a Latin alphabet).

How You Can Help

Help is needed to correct computer generated translations. If you are interested in contributing or are interested in translations that do not yet exist, post a message on the FDS user forum.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Elizabeth Blanchard (fr), Franck Didieux (fr), Susan Killian (de) and Christian Rogsch (de) for correcting the various language files.