This document contains information for people who are interested in translating Neverball (and Neverputt) to their language of choice.
If you have any questions after reading this document, do not hesitate to ask them, so that this document can be further improved.
Neverball is internationalised using the GNU Gettext internationalisation library. In this approach, translators typically work with PO files containing "message identifiers" (source text) and "message strings" (translations of the source text).
It is advisable to use a dedicated PO editing tool instead of editing the files manually. By doing so, you will ensure that files remain in a valid format and encoding, and source text is not accidentally modified, and it will also minimise the time required for translation.
Listed below are few of such editing tools. There are also custom modes and plugins available for Vim and Emacs and probably your own favourite extensible text editor.
Poedit is a multi-platform PO file editor. If you are using Microsoft Windows, Poedit is likely to be your only option. The interface is straight-forward and the editor is easy-to-use. It appears to lack documentation for key bindings, however, and plural forms for your language will have to be entered manually (if needed).
KBabel is an advanced PO editor for KDE. It is so advanced, in fact, that this author gave up trying it out during the initial set-up... Can be overwhelming and may require some time to become familiar with.
gtranslator is a PO file editor for the GNOME desktop environment. While being one of the easiest-to-use editors from those mentioned here, it unfortunately has a critical bug (up until version 1.1.7 as of this writing) and does not handle certain message identifiers correctly. Therefore it is not usable with Neverball at the moment.
First, if there is already a translation for your language, contact the current translator (or translation team), as indicated in the respective PO file. A list of current translations is available in the "po" subdirectory of the source code tree.
If your language does not yet have a translation, download the translation template file "neverball.pot". Then, translate it.
Important remarks:
After completing the translation, send us the translated file. You can open a new thread in the forum and either link the PO file from there or send the file to one of the developers.
The currently accepted practice is to copy the French text verbatim (untranslated) and only translate the parts in English.
The French text comes from the intro messages of most of Mehdi's levels. What can probably be assumed to be the the first attempts to introduce i18n in Neverball is now seen as a sort of a "trade mark" for Mehdi's levels. In any case, this is an exception, not the norm, and these days mappers are expected to just stick with the "real deal" and use Gettext to do the localisation.
A good description of Gettext plural form handling is available in the Gettext documentation. It is somewhat technical in nature, however, it is advisable to read the entire section to gain a good understanding of the concept. Below is a short (but not necessarily easier to understand) summary.
PO entries involving plural forms typically look like this (example taken from the Finnish translation):
#: ball/st_goal.c:157 #, c-format msgid "%d new bonus level" msgid_plural "%d new bonus levels" msgstr[0] "%d uusi bonuskenttä" msgstr[1] "%d uutta bonuskenttää"
The number of "msgstr[x]" lines depends on how many plural forms there are in your language. The number of plural forms is in turn specified in the Plural-Forms header at the top of the PO file:
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"
Here "nplurals" is the number of plural forms and "plural" is an expression used to determine the plural form of the number "n". (See the Gettext documentation for details and limitations.)
Each "msgstr[x]" should contain the translation using the plural form "x" where "x" corresponds to a value of the plural expression.