Lgi now supports cross-platform multi-language for all applications that choose to use it, however at this time Scribe and i.Ftp are the only applications taking advantage of the translation capabilities of Lgi.

Well, how do you actually create new translations?

To start with you will need to download the latest version of the application (whatever that is) so that you have an up to date resource file. You should also download a copy of LgiRes, the editor for the resource file.

• Scribe
• LgiRes

The language data is stored in the .lr8 file that came with the application. You can open this up in a text editor or LgiRes and have a browse through the raw UI information. Worst comes to worst you can edit this directly to add a language but it's probably going to be easier to use LgiRes, the custom application for editing .lr8 files. I'm telling you this so that you to be aware of the second option if you have trouble with LgiRes.

After adding the translation to the .lr8 file you can start the application to see your changes. If your computers language is set to whatever language you are adding you should see the new text in the dialogs etc. But if your settings are just english that you can change the language inside the program. For Scribe use Options -> Appearence and then restart the application. For i.Ftp use the Language menu.

Start LgiRes. Open the lr8 file and wait for it to load.

You can hide and show the various languages inside the lr8 file using View -> Show Languages menu. Also the View menu can change the languages shown in lists and dialogs:

(click to enlarge)

Scroll down to the string groups in the tree of resources:

Click on each string group, and then click the yellow bordered 'L' to add a language to the group, select the language you are going to translate to and click Ok.

Now you have an extra column labelled with the language you just added. You can now select each string in the list and add the translation of the text in the edit boxes in the lower left part of the window.

As you go save the file to app2.lr8, app3.lr8 every 15 minutes or so. That you have a history of backups that you can revert to.

If a string doesn't have a direct translation, ie the "..." strings, just leave it. The program will default back to english where there is no translated string. If your translation is the same as the english then LgiRes will discard it when it saves the file, this is just to save space.

After all the strings are translated, go down the the menu "ID_MENU".

Add your language to the menu by clicking the yellow bordered "L":

This way you can add a new language. Then go through each item in the tree and fill out the translations of the menu items.

When the translation is finished, you can test your work by starting the application with the command line shown above and your lang code to see the new translation in action. Mind you you'll have to back up the original lr8 file and copy in your edited version for this to work.

When your happy with the translation, send the lr8 file to me so that I can include it in the next version of the application. That way everyone benifits from your work.

When new versions of the software are released there are often new bits of user interface and strings, which need translating too. The best way to find untranslated strings is to use Edit -> Find and select the "Find missing translation in this language" option with your translation's language selected.

Firstly you must use a text editor that can handle utf-8 to edit the lr8 file.

It's not as hard as it sounds. Really! Basically at the top of the file theres lots of string definitions which associate a numerical value with one or more strings in different languages. This allows the one user interface element to have different text without being defined twice. Unlike in WIN32 resource scripts where each dialog is defined differently for different languages and updating the user interface means opening every version of the dialog and making your change.

Anyway back to the task of adding a translation. The initial strings look something like this:

<string Ref=2 Cid=1112 Define="IDC_SOCKS5"
	en="Optional SOCKS 5 Proxy Settings"
	fr="Paramtres Proxy socks5"
	it="Settaggi Proxy SOCKS5"
	cs="Voliteln SOCKS 5 proxy nastaven"/>

This is standard XML markup, so all the XML formatting rules apply. The line breaks and attributes are not sensitive to whitespace. However you can put a new line character in a string using '\n'. You'll see that some strings have '\n' in them, and you should try and include those in your translation.

Ok the initial "String" says that this tag is a string, and the "Ref" is a globally unique value to link this string with an element in the user interface, defined later in the file. The "Define" the value is use in my C++ code to reference the string or user interface element. So changing that won't effect anything. The interesting part is the language attributes. These define the text for different languages, in this example "en" is the code for english and "fr" is the code for french. So this element has 4 languages. To add a translation to spanish for instance you would add an attribute like this:

<string Ref=2 Cid=1112 Define="IDC_SOCKS5"
	en="Optional SOCKS 5 Proxy Settings"
	fr="Paramtres Proxy socks5"
	it="Settaggi Proxy SOCKS5"
	cs="Voliteln SOCKS 5 proxy nastaven"
	es="Parmetros opc. Proxy SOCKS5"/>

("es" being the language code for spanish)

The language codes are defined below. All text has to be in utf-8 so you must use a utf-8 capable editor otherwise the data will be corrupted.

Language	Id
Abkhazian	ab
Afar	aa
Afrikaans	af
Albanian	sq
Amharic	am
Arabic	ar
Armenian	hy
Assamese	as
Aymara	ay
Azerbaijani	az
Belarusian	be
Bashkir	ba
Basque	eu
Bengali	bn
Bhutani	dz
Bihari	bh
Bislama	bi
Breton	br
Bosnian	bs
Brazilian Portuguese	pt_br
Bulgarian	bg
Burmese	my
Cambodian	km
Catalan	ca
Chinese	zh
Chinese Simplified	zh_cn
Chinese Traditional	zh_tw
Corsican	co
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Dutch	nl
English	en
Esperanto	eo
Estonian	et
Faeroese	fo
Farsi	fa
Fiji	fj
Finnish	fi
French	fr
Frisian	fy
Galician	gl
Gaelic	gd
Gaelic	gv
Georgian	ka
German	de
Greek	el
Greenlandic	kl
Guarani	gn
Gujarati	gu
Hausa	ha
Hebrew	he
Hindi	hi
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Indonesian	id
Interlingua	ia
Interlingue	ie
Inuktitut	iu
Inupiak	ik
Irish	ga
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Javanese	jv
Kannada	kn
Kashmiri	ks
Kazakh	kk
Kinyarwanda	rw
Kirghiz	ky
Kirundi	rn
Korean	ko
Kurdish	ku
Laothian	lo
Latin	la
Latvian	lv
Limburgish	li
Lingala	ln
Lithuanian	lt
Luganda	lg
Macedonian	mk
Malagasy	mg
Malay	ms
Malayalam	ml
Maltese	mt
Maori	mi
Marathi	mr
Moldavian	mo
Mongolian	mn
Nauru	na
Nepali	ne
Norwegian	no
Occitan	oc
Oriya	or
Oromo	om
Pashto	ps
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Punjabi	pa
Quechua	qu
Rhaeto-Romance	rm
Romanian	ro
Runyakitara	ry
Russian	ru
Samoan	sm
Sangro	sg
Sanskrit	sa
Serbian	sr
Serbo-Croatian	sh
Sesotho	st
Setswana	tn
Shona	sn
Sindhi	sd
Sinhalese	si
Siswati	ss
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Somali	so
Spanish	es
Sundanese	su
Swahili	sw
Swedish	sv
Tagalog	tl
Tajik	tg
Tamil	ta
Tatar	tt
Telugu	te
Thai	th
Tibetan	bo
Tigrinya	ti
Tonga	to
Tsonga	ts
Turkish	tr
Turkmen	tk
Twi	tw
Uighur	ug
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Uzbek	uz
Vietnamese	vi
Volap?k	vo
Welsh	cy
Wolof	wo
Xhosa	xh
Yiddish	yi
Yoruba	yo
Zulu	zu