Translating
From Me and My Shadow
New feature in MeAndMyShadow 0.4 is translation support. This makes it possible to play the game in many different languages. However our developers can't know every languages in the world. So that's why we need your help. If you speak/write some language fluently, you can easily help us.
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Why should this game be translated?
English is a language used all over the world. Computers games and applications are usually written in it. The problem is that there are many people in the world who can't understand English at all or have poor skills it. This concerns especially small children and old people. This might prevent these people to enjoy and understand MeAndMyShadow properly.
How to translate?
Me and My Shadow is using GNU gettext which uses .po files for translation. It's one of the most commonly used translation format and therefore it's greatly supported. There are two kind of translations in MeAndMyShadow: game's user interface (e.g. buttons) and levelpacks (notification blocks, level names).
.po files can be manually edited even with simple text editors like Notepad or gedit. But to make this easier to, it's better to use some GUI tool. We recommend you to check out Poedit. It's a cross-platform tool which is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You will probably find it from your Linux distribution's repository.
Getting needed files
This part isn't complete yet.
Using Poedit
Before starting
Poedit creates automatically compiled .mo files by default. This isn't needed by MeAndMyShadow and that's why it's recommended to turn it off. To do this go to Edit->Preferences, change to Editor tab and uncheck "Automatically compile .mo files on save".
Sometimes translatable strings contain comments from our developers to help you understand the meaning and guide you in other ways. To view these check View->Show comments window.
Creating a new translation
Go to File->New catalog from POT file... This will show you a file dialog. If you want to translate GUI, select messages.pot from data/locale directory. Translating levelpack can be done by selecting messages.pot from data/levelpacks/name/locale.
Now dialog opens and you should fill in information most importantly language and country. Press OK and save dialog opens. File should be saved in the locale directory messages.pot with name according to the ISO 639 standard (see [1]). So for example for Finnish would be fi.po, German de.po and American English en_US.po.
Translating
Now you should see the main window with list of all translatable strings. Just select one and write your translation on the textbox at the bottom.
Updating translation
messages.pot is changing all the time and some old .po file might be created against old version of it. So all .po files should be kept up-to-date. Updating .po file from Poedit is easy. First open it from File->Open and then select Catalog->Update from POT file... Then find messages.pot file and press OK. This will show a dialog of what's changed. Press OK and start updating the file.
I have a problem...
First make sure you've read this page very carefully! If it doesn't help you, contact us. We're happy to help you!
I have created a translation. Now what?
Share it with us and the rest of the world of course! Contact us and we will most likely include your translating in the next release.
