Translations

One of the main design goals for Geotag was, to make translating the user interface easy. Geotag is now available in the following languages:

• English
• American English
• German
• Danish Translation by Uffe Ougaard

For other languages we will need volunteers. Here is what you need to translate Geotag:
The translation tool is integrated with the Eclipse IDE used to develop Geotag. Translating without this tool would be awkward. For example: the German character ä needs to be represented by the text \u00E4 in the resource bundle (the files containing all the translatable text). The Eclipse ResourceBundle Editor allows you to type ä and it takes care of storing it in the correct format. It is therefore necessary to install Eclipse. Step by step instructions how to do this, can be found here. Once you have got this step working, there are a few more things to do:

• Download the Eclipse ResourceBundle Editor from here and follow the installation instructions. Don't forget to restart Eclipse.
• Open Geotag->res->org.fibs.geotag
• Right click on the file messages.properties
• Select Open with -> ResourceBundle Editor
• Click on the New tab at the bottom of the ResourceBundle editor area.
• Select the new language you want to translate into. Choose the most generic one you can find. For example choose Danish instead of Danish (Denmark) unless your translation is for a regional variety of the language only spoken in a particular country.
• Click on Create

When you now open the message.properties file you can enter translations in your language. There is a red button in the outline view that hides completed translations, when clicked, so you can see how much work is left to do.
To force Geotag to use a certain language add -language=xy to the Program arguments in the Run dialog you encountered when running Geotag from Eclipse for the first time.

Translation guidelines

Run Geotag often, to check that your translations show up in the right places.

The following strings must be present unchanged in your translation

• %d - Represents an integer number argument
• %s - Represents a string argument
• %1$s, %2$d are similar, only they also specify the position of the argument
  It's OK to swap them around. For example:
  %1$s has detected %2$d MB of memory.
  might result in:
  Geotag has detected 42 MB of memory.
  Your language might be better suited with a construct like
  %2$d MB of memory were detected by %1$s.
  resulting in:
  42 MB of memory were detected by Geotag
  However:
  %1$d MB of memory were detected by %2$s
  will cause a runtime error - don't change those strings.
  %1$s MB of memory were detected by %2$d.
  will result in
  Geotag MB of memory were detected by 42.
  which is obviously nonsense - make sure they are at the right position.

• <br> A line break - does not work everywhere. Only use where it's used in the English original text.
• <b> Start bold text. See <br>
• </b> End of bold text. See <br>

The messages in the MapHandler section are the messages displayed on Google Maps opened by Geotag. They are special in two respects:

• Special (non-ASCII) characters can't be entered directly, but must be specified as their HTML equivalents. For example the German lower case o-umlaut ö needs to specified as &ouml;. A list of those special characters can be found here.
• Some characters are surrounded by <u> and </u>. These specify the shortcut keys available for the actions in the menu on Google maps. Those characters need to be different for each menu item, except for Show menu and Hide menu which should use the same character as a shortcut key.

The messages file contains the GPL license. If you want to translate it, please use a translation found here. If there is no translation available, please do not translate the license yourself, but leave the English text in place.
Please stay close to the original English wording, but avoid using English words in your translation if there are equivalent words for that term in your language. If you can't think of an equivalent word in your language, try to think harder or ask other people, but ignore them if they say everyone will understand the English word.
Once you have translated all texts, please proofread them and send me your messages.properties_xy file.