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TRANSLATION.md

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Translation strings

Sonic Visualiser loads translation strings from the Qt .qm compiled files found in the i18n/ directory. These are generated from the editable XML .ts strings files in the same location, using the standard Qt5 language tools (lupdate, lrelease, and the Linguist interactive editor).

Everything that appears within a tr() call anywhere in the source code is available for translation: this means nearly 2000 strings, although a great many are obscure or unimportant.

The translations are not currently updated automatically during the build, but there is a script (that works on Linux and macOS) in misc/update-i18n.sh that runs the update. This script should be run without any command-line arguments, and it:

  1. Brings any new strings from the source code into the .ts files, merging translations, using lupdate

  2. Compiles all of the .ts files into .qm files ready to be included into the next build, using lrelease.

This means you can run it both before and after making a change to a translation - run it beforehand to ensure the merged strings are up-to-date, then again afterwards to compile the newly updated strings into the .qm file for build and testing.

The .qm files are then included into the compiled binary as Qt resources, by virtue of being listed in the resource file sonic-visualiser.qrc.

Adding a new language

I believe the process should go like this:

  1. Add your language's ISO code to the list in the LANGUAGES variable at the top of the misc/update-i18n.sh script

  2. Run the misc/update-i18n.sh script to update the existing .ts XML files in the i18n/ directory and generate the new one

  3. Use Qt5 Linguist to edit the .ts file and add translations

  4. (Make a copy of the edited .ts file - or commit it locally - in case the next script invocation goes wrong! You don't want to lose work)

  5. Run misc/update-i18n.sh again to create compiled .qm files from the .ts files

  6. Edit the XML file sonic-visualiser.qrc in a text editor, and add the new compiled .qm file to the list of .qm files near the bottom so that it gets compiled into the binary

  7. Build Sonic Visualiser following the COMPILE instructions elsewhere and test.

Corrections, enhancements, & efficiency improvements welcome!