Help with translations

Due to the constant flow of new information from our development team and the need to communicate to the community in different languages, we decided to make a particular call to all people with skills to translate text from one language to another.
Among the types of documents that constantly need translation are:

- News and Announcements on our website
- Tutorials, Manuals and Examples
- Language Support files for the Tupi program (required so that it can be used in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc)

For news and tutorials, just simply contact us if you want to translate a particular piece of text or if you want to help but you don’t know what to tackle, we can assign something to you, we always have something needing translation.

Language support, if you didn’t know, are the files that provide the ability of an application to print all its messages, menus etc. in a particular language. If you’re interested in making Tupi available in Chinese, Arabic, French or another language of your interest, then you’re in the right place to help.
In the case of language support files, you need to have some knowledge of the tools and processes we use to create and manage these files. Follow the instructions and you can become one of our most important translators:

Learn what linguist is and how it works.
Tupi is a software application developed with the Qt library, which is written in C++. The good news is you do not have to learn Qt or C++ to help translate. It is, however, important to note that Qt is not just a library for development, but also includes several additional tools that facilitate application development. One is linguist, a simple program that is included in the installation of Qt that allows you to create support for new languages for Tupi.

Fig #68. linguist application

If you have Qt installed on your computer, you probably already have linguist installed. Look for the application on the main menu of your graphical environment, in the Programming section

Fig #69. Opening linguist

The raw material for this utility is a file with the .ts extension, from which you can translate all the messages that are part of Tupi into the language you want. The good news is that you do not have to start from scratch, because we already have one (tupi_es.ts) on our website. Download it and rename it according to the language you want translated, for example if you want to create support for Tupi Italian, then rename the file as tupi_it.ts and open it from the linguist program like this:

Fig #70. Opening a translation file (.ts)

Now, let’s look at the most important components of the program that we will use. The first is the list of contexts. This name sounds complex, but is nothing more than a list of groups of words. That is, each list item you see in the figure simply represents a group of words associated with that context.

Fig #71. List of contexts

The next component is the list of words or phrases associated with a context. These words and phrases appear in Tupi and are what we translate. Each context can have a variable number of words or phrases to be translated. Regardless, all texts need to be translated.

Fig #72. List of words in a context

So far, we have located the names of the groups (contexts) and the list of words for each context. Now, let’s cover the most important tool, the translations form:

Fig #73. Translations form

Now let’s see in detail what fields we have to consider on the translations form:

Fig #74. Translation form in detail

The box highlighted in red contains the word or phrase that we need to translate, in this particular case, the word "Pen". The green box contains the underlined space where we put the translation. In this particular case of translation into Spanish: "Pencil."
This is just one word, but for the whole process: Once you open the file for translation (e.g. tupi_it.ts), we select, one by one, all contexts (1). For each selected context, we will have to click on each of the words or phrases listed in the second column of the interface (2), to translate it in the form located at the bottom (3). Once we have gone through all the settings and there are no more words to translate, you have finished the task.

Fig #75. Main components of the application linguist

Finally, you should save and send the file by mail to our development team for inclusion in future versions of Tupi.

Fig #76. Saving the translation project (.ts)

If you want to learn more about linguist, you can consult the official manual here:

http://developer.qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-4.8/linguist-manual.html