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Creating a New Language Translation XML
Starting a new language translation is easy. Click File/Make new language template. Enter the name of your language in English (French, German, etc), then select a filename in which to store it. By default it will go in your user script folder, which is basically essential for the initial stages of development.
Open the newly-created file in your text or xml editor. All the translatable elements are listed, over 1600 at present. All the menu items are listed in alphabetic order, then all the dialogs are listed in alphabetic order, with each editable control in alphabetic order within each dialog.
Each translatable element has from and to elements. Do not change the from field! Add your translation to the to field, which is initially empty. Please see the next section, on Character Sets, for some more details. Also, do not change the id or class fields.
Keep in mind that the space available for each control is fixed and limited, so translated text will have to be kept very short and succinct or abbreviated. Requiring a smaller UI font size preference, or a specific UI font name preference, are options if necessary. (Menu translations do not have to worry about limited space.)
You do not have to translate every element—you can start with as few or as many as you want.
Note that some text is dynamically generated by SynthEyes, and therefore cannot be permanently changed by a translation. For example, the Undo and Redo menu items are changed dynamically based on what will be undone or redone. It is possible that there may be restrictions on translating other fields as well.
We strongly recommend that you do not change the order of entries . As long as everyone uses the same alphabetic ordering, it is easy for you or us to compare and merge files translated by different users, to produce a composite result. Perhaps you might translate some menus, someone else translates some dialogs; we can put them together to a more-complete file.
When you create, open, and save the translation XML file from your text editor, you'll need to make sure that it uses UTF-8 character coding.
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