Translations

Translations

TinyPPI's settings, overlay labels, notifications and the web dashboard are translated through Kodi's standard strings.po files.

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Available languages

Language	Folder
English (source)	resources/language/resource.language.en_gb/
German	resources/language/resource.language.de_de/
Arabic	resources/language/resource.language.ar_sa/
Hungarian	resources/language/resource.language.hu_hu/
Simplified Chinese	resources/language/resource.language.zh_cn/

Kodi picks the file matching Settings → Interface → Regional → Language, falling back to English for anything missing. The dashboard receives its UI strings from the box in the same language (via /api/hello), so a phone always shows the language Kodi is set to, not the phone's own.

The add-on's summary and description in addon.xml are translated separately, with one <summary lang="…"> and <description lang="…"> per language.

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The string files

Each file holds 424 strings:

msgctxt "#32000"
msgid "General"
msgstr "Allgemein"

• msgid is the English source text — identical in every file.
• msgstr is the translation; empty in en_gb.
• The files are maintained with POEditor (X-Generator: POEditor.com).

Some strings are not translated on purpose:

• format names in the VS10 dialog (SDR → HDR10, Dolby Vision (Original)),
• technical values (HDR10, DV, CMv4.0, codec names),
• Kodi's own strings, which TinyPPI reuses where they exist — for example Player process info ($LOCALIZE[10116]) and Yes/No.

Placeholders such as %s (in Season %s or %s h %s min) must stay in the translation.

The color names in the color picker are not in the string files either. They are numbered English names (Red, Red 1, Soft red …); only the seven colors the settings start out on — White, Light blue, Charcoal, Black, Crimson, Tangerine and Forest — are translated (see Colors and Themes).

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How the IDs are arranged

The IDs run up from 32000 in three areas, one after the other. A string used in several places keeps the ID of the area it was added for — the dashboard, for example, reuses the overlay's labels for its readings, and a few settings sit among the dashboard's strings because they arrived with it.

IDs	Area
32000 – 32200	The settings dialog, category by category: General, TinyPPI overlay, DV metadata, codec logos, VS10 dialog, channels, the dashboard and the color picker
32201 – 32273	What the add-on's own code shows: the color picker and its color names, the overlay's start-up messages and labels, and the Dolby Vision metadata view
32274 – 32440	The web dashboard (sent to the page by resources/lib/web/strings.py), with the dashboard's ratings and portrait settings (MDBList, WhatsOn and TMDb keys)

A new string takes the next free ID after the last one in use, which today is the dashboard's area at the end of the file. The few IDs left free where a string was dropped (32371, 32374 – 32377, 32379 – 32382, 32393) are not reused, so a translation made for an older version never shows a string under the wrong ID. Everything stays within 32000 – 32999, the range Kodi reserves for scripts.

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Improving a translation

1. Open the file of your language and find the string by its English msgid.
2. Change its msgstr.
3. Test it: copy the file into /storage/.kodi/addons/script.tinyppi/resources/language/…/strings.po on your box and restart Kodi. Use the file of the TinyPPI version installed on the box — a file from another version may number its strings differently (see How the IDs are arranged).
4. Open a pull request (or an issue with the corrected lines).

Keep translations short: the overlay's labels sit in a fixed-width column, and the settings' help texts are shown in a small box.

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Adding a new language

1. Copy resource.language.en_gb/strings.po to a new folder named after Kodi's language code, e.g. resource.language.fr_fr/strings.po.
2. Set "Language: fr\n" in the header.
3. Fill in every msgstr.
4. Add <summary lang="fr"> and <description lang="fr"> to addon.xml.
5. Add the language to LANGUAGES in tests/unit/test_settings_definition.py. The test then checks that every setting label and help text exists and is translated in the new file.
6. Run python3 -m pytest tests and open a pull request.

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Adding a string (developers)

New user-visible text gets the next free ID in the block of its area (see How the IDs are arranged) and goes into all five files at once, sorted by ID — the English text as msgid everywhere, translations as far as possible. Never squeeze a string into another area's block: if a block runs full, or a new settings category needs a block of its own, the blocks behind it are moved in one go, as in the regrouping after 2.14.2. Settings strings without a translation fail test_settings_definition.py. In Python, read strings with the add-on's localized(<id>) helper; in skin files use $ADDON[script.tinyppi <id>]; for the dashboard, add the ID to _UI_STRINGS in resources/lib/web/strings.py.