Translate Guide

Translator's Guide

Calamares uses Transifex as its translation inrfastructure. The project overview for Calamares shows which languages exist and how translated they are. Translations are (semi-)regularly updated from the calamares (development) branch of Calamares and sent to Transifex; updated translations are imported into the same calamares branch.

This means that stable releases don't get translation updates -- I have not thought of a good way to do that with one Calamares project in Transifex.

Internally, the program uses both Qt translations and GNU gettext. This is invisible for the translator, but it does mean that the same string can show up in two different Calamares string collections.

Getting Started

You'll need a Transifex account. Follow their instructions, they are well-written. Then apply to join the Calamares team. Give us a shout on IRC or in a Calamares issue, so that we know you want to join.

A message on Transifex via their usual request-new-language workflow will also work.

Translation Guidelines

• Just do it. You do not need permission to write translations for Calamares, and we are happy with each new language.
• Please don't change keyboard shortcuts unless you really really have to (keyboard shortcuts can be recognized by having &letter in the string). For Indic languages (Assamese, Hindi and Malayalam and others) the keyboard shortcuts are generally left in Latin-1.

New Languages

A new translation is added to the Calamares source when the team is created, but the language is not enabled for use in Calamares until some strings have been translated.

You can tell that the language has been imported from Transifex at least once when there is a calamares_lang.ts file in the translations directory.

There are automatic thresholds for use: you must reach 5% translation (about 30 strings) before the language will be enabled for users in a Calamares release. The list of languages is updated with each Calamares release, or give a shout on IRC when things have been updated.

The first strings to translate are these:

• Some common user-interface strings like back, next, quit, in the Calamares resource. These strings are always used so it's nice to see immediate results.
• The .desktop file is just 4 strings with the name of the application. These strings live in the fdo resource on Transifex.
• Some common Calamares modules. It's a good idea to start with some common modules, because they are almost always used and you can configure a "harmless" Calamares with just those modules. The welcome message has a handful of variations.

To translate specific modules, use Transifex's filters to pick strings from those modules: translate strings in the calamares resource, then click more in the tab-bar of filters along the top of the list, and then click occurrence and enter a module name from the list below.

• ViewManager (not a module, but contains most of the common strings)
• Welcome
• Summary
• Finished

It is safe to ignore the dummypythonqt resource entirely.

Testing New Languages

A new language is added to the bad list. That means that the translation is at 0% completion, not that the translation itself is bad. As the translation is completed, the language will be moved from one completion-status to another within the Calamares code.

If you have Calamares installed, you can test new translations (as long as the language is enabled for users, e.g. isn't on the "bad" list) without building Calamares. You will need the .ts file for the translation, and the Qt translation tools installed -- in particular, you need to be able to run lrelease (or lrelease-qt5) to build a .qm file.

In general:

• Place your .ts file somewhere. Call it calamares_<lang>.ts, for instance calamares_en.ts for an English-language translation.
• Compile it to .qs with using lrelease.

The compilation process looks like this:

$ lrelease calamares_en.ts
Updating 'calamares_en.qm'...
    Generated 609 translation(s) (607 finished and 2 unfinished)
    Ignored 2 untranslated source text(s)

You can deploy the file in three different ways:

• (All Calamares) Copy the .qs file to the lang/ subdirectory of the Calamares data directory. This usually means copy it to /usr/share/calamares/lang/. This is intended for distributions, since it needs no changes to the way Calamares is normally run.
• (All Calamares) Run Calamares with the -T command-line argument. It will read the translation from the current directory. This is intended for translators who are working on a particular translation.
• (Locally-built Calamares) Run Calamares with the -d command-line argument. This runs debug mode, which loads all configuration and settings and modules from the current directory. This is intended for developers.

Timezone Translations

The global list of timezones is made of names like Europe/Amsterdam, Africa/Harare and Asia/Tokyo -- those are regions and cities. The timezone page (generally part of the locale module) displays these names. It is possible to translate those names for local use (e.g. the zone "Berlin" is called "Berlijn" in Dutch, because that is the name of the city in Dutch).

The regions and city names are not in Transifex, because it would add about 600 names to the translation load, and it's not entirely clear how many languages would even use the option of translating or transliterating region and zone names.

To translate region and timezone names:

• Take this source file with the region and zone names.
• Enter the translations by hand in that file, putting the translation in the <translation> element and removing the type attribute; for instance, if transliterating Dushanbe into Cyrillic:

    <message>
        <location filename="../src/libcalamares/locale/ZoneData_p.cxxtr" line="176"/>
        <source>Dushanbe</source>
        <comment>tz_names</comment>
        <translation>Душанбе</translation>
    </message>
  

• Add that file with translations as lang/tz_<lang>.ts where lang is the language code, and submit the changed file to the Calamares source repository.

Special Cases

• Esperanto was not available as a language in Qt prior to Qt 5.12.2. To use Esperanto you need a sufficiently new Qt version.
• Interlingue exists as a translation, but no version of Qt supports it.
• Serbian is available both in Cyrillic and Latin spellings, but the language name for the Latin spelling is non-standard in Calamares (for historical reasons), sr@latn.