1. Available translations    2. How to create a translation    3. Important notes 

XDESK

SysTrayX

XFilesDialog

  1. Available translations    2. How to create a translation    3. Important notes 

In order to create a translation for XDESK or SysTrayX all what is needed is a good text editor and a good knowledge of the "destination language", including a large number of Windows terms - but some of those terms can be found HERE .

You also need a decent knowledge of one "source language" - it is not necessary to be English (right now it can also be German, French or Dutch) - however, the English version is generally the most "recent". A decent knowledge of XDESK itself is also a good idea (but doing the translation will improve that anyway).

The first step in starting the translation is to select your text editor - even the old notepad.exe can be used and there are a lot of other great free text editors that can work very well, but probably WordPad has a number of small advantages - it comes free with all recent versions of Windows, it can be configured to do NO text wrap (in View / Options) and can display text with any font you want (Courier or similar is better, since the width of each letter will be the same).

Another very important tool might be a program that can compare two versions of the same file - WinDiff is a well-known one (from the Windows Platform SDK) and another nice alternative is the "Syncronize dirs..." tool from Windows Commander but a FREE and BETTER alternative is the FCU File-Compare Utility (a local copy is available here) - it can also be a nice text editor on the resulting file!

The next step is to find the file for the "source language" - it should be located under \XDESK\LNG - and copy it as the "destination language" - for instance locate ENGLISH.LNG and copy it to DUTCH.LNG (in the same folder). From here on all changes will be made in DUTCH.LNG with your text editor.

The first thing to change should be the name of the language in the first lines:

[XDESK_LANGUAGE]

_____=English

should probably become something like:

[XDESK_LANGUAGE]

_____=Dutch

(since this name will also be used for automatic detection it will have to be the English name of the language, NOT the name of the language as it is known to its speakers).

It is now possible to save the translation file, then go in XDESK Settings / Lang+Auto and select this new language and press < OK > - for the moment nothing will be changed in the UI since no term was yet translated :) but the settings to use that translation file will be saved in XDESK.

Then we can translate the first element - all elements are located AFTER the = sign, so

40003=Se&ttings Win+T

is an element that can be translated, while

[Main Menu]

MUST NOT be changed (everything in [] is called the name of a section, and all the lines from there to the next text in [] are the section itself).

Now about how the translation looks - for instance in German it is something like that:

40003=&Einstellungen Win+T

while in French is similar to:

40003=&Paramètres Win+T

A few things should be noted:

- the resources from the .LNG files are applied each time a dialog or menu is shown, so you can make changes to the file, save it and without restarting XDESK (actually without doing anything else in XDESK, only generate again that menu or dialog) you can check how the final result will look!

- some characters will look very strange if seen with a font for another language (for instance the French translation above will look strange on a Windows for US English), but as long as it looks OK in the "destination" language with the normal font used there everything should be just fine;

- the number BEFORE the = sign should not be changed, and lines should not be moved between sections;

- everything after the = should be translated (if possible)

- the special & character marks (precedes) the shortcut that will be used to select that UI element - for instance "Se&ttings" means that "T" can be used as a shortcut from the keyboard in the Main Menu. Most elements do not have such a shortcut but menus almost always have; the letter marked with the & does not need to be the same as in English; ideally, for common elements it should be the same letter used by Windows itself in that language - and for unusual elements the translator should pick the first letter unless it was used before in the same section - in this case pick the second letter of the word and so on; ideally those shortcuts should be added AFTER the translation for the entire section is finished;

- right now some hotkeys are not generated automatically (or correctly) by XDESK - for instance Win+T in the example above can actually be changed by the user - the next version of XDESK will correct that, but in order to do that automatically you should use the same convention as in the English version - that is, a TAB should be used before such representations for hotkeys;

- for submenus and dialogs the section will look similar to this:

[&Utilities]

_____=&Utilities

The first part - [&Utilities] - is the name of the section and should NOT be changed, HOWEVER the second line (with the 5 _ chars) is the "translated name" and should be changed !

- very long lines or lines that start or end with spaces should be enclosed in double quotation marks - "" - as here:

[STRING_TABLE]

00001=" With .... "

- the translation should be kept as short as possible !!! (and checked to see if it looks OK in XDESK).

  1. Available translations    2. How to create a translation    3. IMPORTANT NOTES 

1) please contact us before starting the translation - it is not impossible that a number of people have already started doing the same translation and if the number is not very big the work should rather be "split" between them, while if the number is VERY big it will not be wise for us to offer so many full licenses :)

2) the copyright for the translation will be "shared" by all the translators involved, but XDESKSOFTWARE will have the right to distribute the translation file in any way (like with XDESK or from its web sites) - and of course that the credits for those translations will entirely go to the authors (we'll also add a special element to display that in the Settings / Auto/Lang page).

3) the copyright of XDESK (together with the original 3 "translations" - English, German and French) will remain entirely with XDESKSOFTWARE, and the authors of any translation must first agree to the terms of that copyright.