Translations

Ettin Edit's menus, dialogs and messages can be shown in another language. It comes with English, German (Deutsch), French (Français) and Spanish (Español), and you can add more languages or change any translation with a text file.

The German, French and Spanish translations are machine-made starting points. They haven't been checked by native speakers yet, so some wording will be clumsy or wrong. Corrections are very welcome: see Improving a translation.

Choosing the language

Open Settings > Preferences… (Ctrl+,). Interface language is at the top of Files and Startup.

Same as the system (the default) follows your system's language. On Linux that's the LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES or LANG setting; on Windows it's the language in your region settings. A regional language uses its base language when there's no translation for the region, so de_AT gets German. A language with no translation gets English.
Or pick a language from the list.

The window changes language at once; there's nothing to restart.

What stays in English

The user manual, including the in-app copy.
Names of programming languages and themes, and Plain Text.
Messages from the text tools' parsers, such as a JSON or XML syntax error and its line number, and messages from XPath, XSD, XSLT and SQL.
Messages from plugins, unless the plugin translates them itself (see Writing plugins).
Templates Ettin Edit writes for you, such as a new language file.

Right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew can't be shown correctly yet, because the toolkit Ettin Edit is drawn with doesn't lay out right-to-left text.

The translations folder

Open Translations Folder, next to the language list in Preferences, opens the translations folder in your settings folder, creating it if needed. It also puts english-source.ftl.txt there: every message in English, with notes, kept up to date by Ettin Edit. Copy from it; don't edit it, because it is replaced each time.

Each file in the folder is named after its language code, such as pt.ftl for Portuguese, pt-BR.ftl for Brazilian Portuguese, or de.ftl for German. After adding or changing a file, press Reload next to the language list.

Adding a language

Copy english-source.ftl.txt to a new file named after the language, such as it.ftl.
Change language-name = English to the language's own name, such as language-name = Italiano. That's the name shown in the list.
Translate the text after each =. Leave the ids before the =, and anything in { $braces }, as they are.
Press Reload in Preferences and pick the language.

You don't have to translate everything at once. Any message the file doesn't have is shown in English.

Improving a translation

A file for a language Ettin Edit already has is used on top of the built-in translation, message by message. So to fix a few German messages, make a de.ftl that holds only those messages:

save-as = Speichern als …
find-hint = Suchen

To share your fixes with everyone, send them to the project on GitHub. The built-in files are in assets/i18n in the source.

The file format

The files use Fluent, a format made for translating software. Most lines are just id = text. A few things to know:

Text in { $braces } is filled in by Ettin Edit, such as a file name or a count. You can move it within the sentence, but keep its name.
A long message can continue on the next lines, indented by spaces.
Lines starting with # are notes and are ignored.
Messages that depend on a number choose between forms:
```
differences-count = { $count ->
    [one] { $count } difference
   *[other] { $count } differences
}
```
The names in brackets are the language's plural forms (zero, one, two, few, many and other), and the one marked * is used when no other fits. Use the forms your language needs; Polish, for example, uses one, few, many and other.

If a file has a mistake, Ettin Edit shows a message naming the file and the problem when it loads it, and still uses the rest of the file.

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