1 aptitude: information for translators
3 Aptitude uses the standard gettext mechanism for translations. However,
4 there are a few twists that you should be aware of.
8 There are several external data files that you can choose to
9 translate: help.txt (online help), help-mine.txt (online help for
10 Minesweeper), and aptitude.xml (user's manual/online manual).
11 aptitude.xml is a large file, but help.txt and help-mine.txt are
12 quite tractable and it is recommended that you translate
13 them. (especially help.txt)
15 aptitude applies gettext to the file names before loading them, so
16 to tell it that you've translated (eg) help.txt to help-de.txt,
17 you should add a translation "help.txt" -> "help-de.txt".
19 In addition, each translated file name has a corresponding
20 described translation (see below) indicating its encoding. You
21 should translate this as necessary if you write an alternate file.
25 aptitude has a manpage, and it can be translated; if you choose to
26 translate it, your translation should be named aptitude.XX.1
27 (replace XX with the language code)
31 aptitude uses an internal function called fragf to format text
32 with display attributes. This function works somewhat like
33 printf, but most escape codes have different meanings. For
34 instance, %B enables the "bold" character attribute, while %b
35 disables it. See src/vscreen/fragment.h for a full description of
36 all escape codes. You can use parameter numbers (eg, %1$F) if
37 your language needs to reorder the arguments.
41 Where it makes sense, aptitude allows the default keybinding
42 assigned to a command to be translated. This is done by creating
43 a dummy translated string ending in "_key"; the first character of
44 the string is the default binding of the key. For instance, the
45 string "yes_key" is used to set the default binding for buttons
46 labelled "Yes". To bind "j" to this command, you could translate
47 "yes_key" to "ja_key", "ja", or even just "j".
49 * Described translations
51 Some translations have descriptions or disambiguating text to the
52 left of the input and output string. In these cases, everything
53 up to and including the first pipe character will be removed
54 before the string is used. If no pipe character is present in the
55 string, the string will be used without modifications.
57 For instance, the string "help.txt encoding|UTF-8" can be
58 translated to either "help.txt encoding|ISO-8859-1",
59 "|ISO-8859-1", or "ISO-8859-1", and will have the same effect in
64 English messages can be found in file section-descriptions. Paragraph
65 separators are " .\n" not "\n\n".