GUI Translation

This page describes the steps required to translate the AJAX GUI into a new language. Please have a look at Hyperion_Translation to see which translations are already available and which are missing at the moment.

Preparation

Before translating anything, it is recommended that the server and the GUI are installed as described in the installation tutorial. If translations are tested somewhere else, the server is not strictly necessary. In this case, only sections II.1, II.2, II.7, III.1, the Saxon library from section III.2, and section IV.4 of the tutorial are relevant.

The translations use portable object (PO) files from GNU gettext as file format. There are several tools available to edit the translations:

• gted (Eclipse Plugin)
• KBabel (Unix/Linux only (KDE))
• poEdit (Multi-Platform)
• OmegaT (Java, Multi-Platform)
• Any text editor, since PO files are simple UTF-8 text files.

At least one of these will be required by the translator.

Generating a translation template

Translations are usually performed by filling out a translation template. This template (a file with the extension .pot) is generated by executing the pot task in Ant. Execute this in your open-xchange-gui source directory:

ant pot

The -D switch should specify the same path as in section IV.4 of the installation tutorial. This will produce a file called ox.pot in the i18n directory of the GUI source. This file contains all untranslated text strings found in the source code. The corresponding entries can be either entered manually or merged automatically with an existing translation created for an older version of the GUI. In the latter case, only new and changed strings need to be updated manually. You will now have to modify (translate) the created .pot file with a translation tool of you choice, the dedicated tools are a great help for this task.

Installing

After a POT file is translated or merged, it should be saved as ox.xx_XX.po, where xx_XX is the language code like e. g. de_DE or en_US. Each translation should be saved as i18n/xx_XX/ox.xx_XX.po.

For example:

/usr/src/open-xchange-gui/i18n/xx_XX/ox.xx_XX.po

To include the new language in the build process, one line must be added to the file i18n/languages.js:

var all_languages = {

  "de_DE": "Deutsch",
  "en_GB": "English (UK)",
  "en_US": "English (US)",
  "fr_FR": "Français",
  "xx_XX": "Language name",

"":""};

Please note that each language line must end with a comma.

After that, the new translation must be transformed to JavaScript and copied to its final destination on the web server. This is done by starting Ant again, as described in section IV.4 of the installation tutorial:

ant deploy

Installing a CVS translation on a released version of OX

Most people probably use the CVS version of OX to generate the pot file. However, you may want to deploy the translation on a stable, released version of OX. In that case you might want to consider following these instructions.

First of all, you should "deploy" the translation to a fake directory instead of the default (/var/www). This can be done by editing the open-xchange-gui/build.xml file. If you look at the deploy target, you'll notice that the modified files are copied to ${destdir}/${htdoc}:

<target name="deploy" depends="all_with_clean">
    <copy todir="${destdir}/${htdoc}">
    --- snip ---

By default the ${htdoc} points to /var/www, which is not the correct path in any case (should probably be /var/www/html/ox6). We change htdoc to point to a fake directory:

<project name="HEAD-gui" default="all" basedir=".">
       <property name="htdoc" value="/tmp/ox/"/>
       --- snip ---

After modifying the build.xml we do a couple of simple steps:

• Create the directory /tmp/ox
• Run ant deploy in open-xchange-gui
• Copy the /tmp/ox/lang/xx_XX.js to the correct OX directory (usually /var/www/html/ox6/lang)
• Edit the /var/www/html/ox6/lang/languages.js as shown above

The translation should now be ready for use. However, to avoid unnecessary trouble, also do the following steps:

• Restart Open X-change server (e.g. /etc/init.d/open-xchange-groupware restart)
• Restart Apache (e.g. /etc/init.d/httpd restart)
• Clear your browser's cache

Checking that the translated Javascript file is valid

If your translated xx_XX.js file does not seem to work correctly, you can used grep to verify that it's correctly formatted. In my case OmegaT translation tool generated a faulty po-file, which in turn was converted into faulty js file:

$ grep -v ".*:.*" fi_FI.js
        msgid "New Appointment"
msgstr ""

This kind of faulty lines need to be removed or things won't work correctly.

You should also verify that the first line of the translated js file is the same or similar to the existing, working translations:

$ head -n 1 de_DE.js {nplurals: 2, plural: function(n) { return (n != 1); }, dictionary: {

In my case the header did not look anything like this, so I had to fix it.