Translation of the user guide

[Cedric-1515]

Hi,
I'm a new user of novelWrite and already enthusiastically using it. Talked about it to a couple of people who are not speaking English and they remain kind of reluctant to skip from their usual commercial docx software to an open source text editor.
Is there anyone willing or planning to translate the user guide?
I can contribute to a French version.

[vkbo]

Someone contributed a French translation of the docs a couple of years ago, but unfortunately keeping up with it is a huge task as it changes a fair bit between each release.

Ideally, a translated documentation would be nice though. The translation tool novelWriter uses is limited by word count, and there is no way the documentation is anywhere near small enough, so I'm uncertain what would be the best approach. Publishing alternative PDF docs could be one option, but without a tool that checks what paragraphs need re-translating for each version, the task is pretty big. If you know of a suitable tool, I'm happy to look into it.

I could set up a shadow repository where translated version of the documentation lives, and automatically build PDFs, so that part is definitely doable.

[Cedric-1515]

Please keep me posted about it.
In the meantime, I'll start translating on a simple file as I have some free time I can dedicate to it right now and we see later how to find a solution.
Looking forward to contributing to novelWriter's documentation!

[vkbo]

Well, translating files directly will not be very usable. The framework for translations uses files like this as the source files, which are the ones that need to be translated:

[vkbo]

It's easy to generate the files, which I've already done. I've attached them here: gettext.zip

They are probably easier to translate with a suitable tool if you can find one. I have never translated this type of files before, so not very familiar with them.

[Cedric-1515]

I will make some research during the weekend.

One last question, if I don't find any tool for it, would it make it useful for you if I edit directly the .pot files with notepad, and then sending back to you a zipped folder with the translated files?

[vkbo]

You need to generate the .po files for the relevant language. See point 4 here. I can easily do that for you as well, but it looks very clunky having to do all of this in notepad. There is a tool for it called poedit available that does all that directly from the .pot files.

[Karduin]

Hi, I made a doc in French using sphinx, sphinx-intl, gettext, poedit and latex. You can find it here.

https://github.com/Karduin/novelWriter-docs_fr

In the /docs/fr_build/htm/ folder: the web doc.

You can download the folder and run index.html.

In the /docs/fr_build/latex/ folder: the pdf doc.

https://github.com/Karduin/novelWriter-docs_fr/blob/main/docs/fr_build/latex/manual.pdf

The .po files are in /docs/sources/locales/fr/LC_MESSAGES/

I'm not sure if the translation is optimal, but it does the job.

[vkbo]

Excellent. I was going to ask. I'll start looking into how to include it. I haven't yet decided what is the best approach. I think adding it to the install package and loading it if the GUI language is French is the best approach.

In any case, we can start looking at how to get your translation files into the main repository. You should be able to make your updates as pull requests to the main repo instead of using a separate one. I also need to figure out how to replace the "User Guide" title with a French title.

[vkbo]

Oh, and I will do a 2.6.1 release as soon as the other GUI translations are done, and I can include the manual then too.

[Karduin]

As you said earlier, since you generate everything automatically, you just need to keep the

• docs/source/locales/fr/LC_MESSAGES folder and the .po and .mo files
• and _build/gettext/.pot.

I think you also need :

• Modify the config.py by adding:

locale_dirs = ['locales/']
gettext_compact = False

• The make latex command replaces the contents of the latex folder. Is there a trick to keeping the original version and the translated version other than having a different build folder?

The .pot files must be common to all, so it seems logical to me that you should be the one to generate them. (But maybe I'm wrong)

I think I should only PR .po and .mo files.

What do you think?

[Karduin]

I also need to figure out how to replace the "User Guide" title with a French title.

modify this line in config.py works.

latex_documents = [(
    master_doc, "manual.tex", "Guide Utilisateur", author, "manual"
)]

I can recompile the pdf. It must be possible to condition compilation according to language.

[vkbo]

Yes, that I know. I just need to figure out how to make it switch based on language.

I can simply pull the name from the index.rst document, like explained here instead of hardcoding it. I'll look into that.