[sword-devel] Sword-Project- Localization Translation file format-something like that.

[Greg Hellings]

Tom,

We understand your need for discretion.  We try to take into account
those in closed countries in our work, as we want them to remain safe
also.  Your question has a number of avenues of answer, depending on
your level of technological comfort.

The most basic is to get the SWORD engine, or library, to understand
book names and common abbreviations in your language.  doing so
involves creating a copy of one of the files which can be found in
locales.d/ near where your modules are installed.  In that directory
you will find a number of files like es.conf and de.conf and ko.conf.
Each of those corresponds to one of the languages that SWORD
understands, as represented by its standard 2-letter abbreviation.  So
es is Spanish, de is German and ko is (I think) Korean.  If the
language you use is not in that list, you'll have to copy one of the
existing .conf files and create your own for the language you're
working with.  Hopefully the structure inside of the files is easy
enough to understand.  Some, like ko.conf also have files like
ko_abbrev.conf.  Others, like es.conf do not.  I don't know why this
is - someone else might inform you better.

The second need is to get the application software of choice into your
language.  Depending on which piece of software you use, there are
different methods to do this.  I know that BibleTime, Xiphos,
BibleDesktop and BPBible are all supposed to support this feature.  I
believe that most (all?) of them use some version of the standard
gettext utilities, but the individual developers for the particular
application you plan to use can give you more information.  It might
be good, if a translation doesn't already exist for any of those, to
choose one that has an existing translation into a major trade
language that some of the native speakers will also be able to
understand.  Then you can have the benefit of using both the English
base and the trade language to help understand the translations
better.  Possible starting points:

BPBible comes with both Vietnamese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
BibleTime comes with this list of languages (you can get language
codes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes if you
don't recognize which ones correspond to which local languages)
http://bibletime.info/translation.shtml
Xiphos has translations listed here:
http://gnomesword.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gnomesword/trunk/po/.
Each of the XX.po files, where XX is a two letter language code,
represents a translation of Xiphos at some stage of completeness.

That should give you an idea of which application might be the best
starting place for your choice (or choices - I'm sure a large amount
of the translation effort can be shared between two or more of the
applications, since they are already very similar to begin with).

I hope this isn't too much information and helps you with your
decision.  If there is any further support you need, continue to
e-mail the list with your questions or you can find us on the freenode
IRC channel.  Just be careful about your country's restrictions!

--Greg

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 12:27 PM,  <tom.t at aheart4seasia.org> wrote:
> Dear Developers,
>
> I am currently working with a national church in small South East Asia
> country, and I have discussed with them about using the Sword-Project
> Software for the pastors for the country. I personally am a fan of the
> software.
>
> However I am having trouble finding instructions on how on the Developers
> Wiki page, about how to find a file to translate the software to show the
> local language instead of English, so that those who don't speak English can
> use the software. And also could be used by others in other countries with
> the same language. We are hoping that it could be translated. Any
> suggestions.
>
> They also want to get the local language bible into a module, Which I have
> the instructions for that. But that will be done after the newest version
> has been published. They have the rights to the publishing translation so it
> isn't an issue.
>
> I apologize for being somewhat broad on the language group, because I work
> in a closed country.
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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