Saladin/Translation

Saladin uses the Qt Linguist application for creating translations.

Translation Files

Translators operate mainly on the .ts files which are located in translations directory of the source package. There is one .ts file for each language, for example saladin_pl.ts for Polish translation.

In order to translate phrases in the .ts file you will need the Qt Linguist application which is shipped with the Qt Framework and available for all platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OS. The detailed user guide can be found in the Qt documentation.

If you are using Windows and don't want to download and install the entire Qt framework, you can use the stand-alone version of Qt Linguist: Linguist.zip.

Translation Process

A week or two before a planned release a "string freeze" is announced, meaning that code cannot be added or modified if that changes any user visible strings. All .ts files are updated to reflect changes in the code made since the previous version and that causes some new untranslated strings to appear. The updated .ts files are sent to the translators responsible for each language and they should send back the completed files. Finally, binary files are generated from the .ts files and included in the release packages.

Adding a New Language

New translations can be created by copying and renaming the saladin_untranslated.ts file. In addition, the locale.ini file must be updated with the code and name of the language. This file is also located in the translations directory.

Testing Translations

When testing translation with a development version, it must be downloaded from the SVN repository and compiled.

Standard lupdate and lrelease tools from Qt Framework are used to update and compile the translation files for Saladin. For testing purposes translators can manually release the completed translation files (this can be done directly using the Qt Linguist).