Translations


In this page you can find some informations on the KVIrc translations status. To see if your language is supported, please look at the list below.

Many people are working hard to support as many languages as possible. To join them all you need to know is your own language: no coding skills are needed.

All translators MUST USE UTF-8 as coding standard. Translation files with other standards will be deprecated.

If you are interested in translating KVIrc in a new language you can find here a nice how-to.
Some languages are updated (almost) daily, others need to find a new maintainer. If you want to help to improve the current support of your language, please contact its Last translator, listed here:

Talking about "unmaintained", we encourage you to help us translating.
To do so, subscribe to the KVIrc mailing list to keep in touch with the developers and to talk about your interest in translating KVIrc.

This mini-howto describes the procedure for translating KVIrc in a new language

Step 0: Getting the right sources.

First of all you need the Git version of KVIrc. To obtain the Git version you can follow the instructions on http://www.kvirc.net/?id=git.
The translation stuff is in kvirc/po/

Step 1: Initialize the build environment

Enter the directory containing the KVIrc code and follow the doc/INSTALL documentation on how to run CMake to generate the needed Makefiles.

Step 2: Finding out your language code

You must find out the contents of your language code. Usually this is a string formed of at least two letters and it can be found by examining the contents of your $LANG shell variable or by looking at http://sourceforge.net/projects/translation.
Examples of such codes are"it", "en", "hu" or "pt_BR".

Step 3: Generating the list of messages to translate

You must perform this step only if it is the first time that KVIrc is translated into your language. If you're going to update an existing translation then you can jump directly to step 4.
Enter your build directory and run this command to extract the messages from the sources:

# make messages-extract

A series of .pot files will be created in the subdirs of build_directory/po/
Each file refers to a specific component of KVIrc: e.g. the main translation file is located in build_directory/po/core/kvirc/kvirc.pot
Create a copy for each of these files named file_xxx.po where file is the name of the component and xxx is your language code found in step 2.

# cd po/core/kvirc
# cp kvirc.pot kvirc_xxx.po
# cd ../kvs
# cp kvs.pot kvs_xxx.po
# cd ../../modules/about
# cp about.pot about_xxx.po
# cd ../modules/addon
# cp addon.pot addon_xxx.po

...and so on for all the other modules; you are not forced to translate all the files at once, but creating the files skeleton for all components is recommended.

Step 4: Translating the messages

If you just followed step 3 then you have just created the *_xxx.po (e.g. kvirc_it.po) files where xxx stands for your language code (found in step 2).
If you jumped directly here from 2 then you need to find the existing *_xxx.po files in the kvirc/po subdirectories.
If no such files exist for your locale, you probably missed to create them in step 3.

You can translate *.po files using a simple text editor (that HAVE to support the UTF-8 encoding), but it's strongly advised that you use a translation software such as lokalize for Linux/kde or poedit for Windows.

Note on the format of the translation files.
The *.po files contains a set of strings like the following one:

#: /path/to/the/file/which/contains/the/string: line number
msgid "The original English message"
msgstr "The translation goes here"

The msgid is the original message that needs to be translated and msgstr is the translation (that will be initially empty, when the kvirc_xxx.po file is created).

The msgid can contain html tags, escapes like "\n" and format strings like "%s". You MUST match the tags, escapes and format specs in the msgstr strings. Keep special attention to the format specifications (%s, %W, %Q, ...).
They must remain EXACTLY the same order as in the msgid: exchanging the order or writing a wrong format spec will lead to crashes sooner or later.

Step 5: Adding the translation to the install system

Once you have translated some strings you can try to run the translation in KVIrc. If you are updating an existing translation then you can jump directly to step 6.

You need to force the build system to pick up your newly created translation files and compile it. This is again an one time step. You'll just need to clean your CMakeCache.txt (located in your build directory) and re-run CMake again for it to pick up the new translation file, then build KVIrc as usual.
When it has finished building, move to the next step.

Step 6: Trying the translation

Run make and wait until it finishes.

Check your $LANG enviroment variable.
If you are translating to same language as your system/user language environment is, there is probably no need to change the language.
Otherwise you need to pass the $LANG variable to the environment when running KVIrc.

# LANG="xxx" kvirc

KVIrc should then pick up your translation file and use it.

Step 7: Updating the translation when the sources change

In the process of KVIrc development, new message strings gets added inside the source files, while some others can change or even get removed.
When you do a Git pull to obtain the latest sources you should then enter your build directory and run:

# make messages-update

This procedure will update your *_xxx.po files with the new messages and mark the old messages as either fuzzy or invalid.
The invalid entries must be re-translated completely again while the fuzzy entries have minor changes and can be probably adjusted in few seconds.

Misc notes:

If you're in doubt about some translation, you could take a look at how similar sentences have been translated in the KDE *.po files, or in other software. If you need some further help, contact us on our mailing list or on IRC (irc://irc.libera.chat/#KVIrc).

Since many of the modules have their own translation files then the procedure above may be repeated for the po/modules/*/ subdirectories.
Anyway you are not forced to translate all the files at once: a partial translation will work anyway.

When you're satisfied with your translation, you can either send your *.po files to the KVIrc mailing list asking for inclusion in the Git repository, or commit and push to your own Git fork. If you want to maintain the translation in the future then you may need a Github account and proper fork.

Happy translating :)
Szymon Stefanek