This page is intended to provide basic instructions about webskin translation, as well as links to the "marked" translation files.
Translation instructions
To create a new language, you will need an UTF-8 text editor (Notepad on Windows XP is ok). Start with english.data. Rename it with the English name of your language, and open it in your editor.
You see two "columns" in the file. The left one contains the strings identifier. You must not touch them. The right one contains the strings you have to translate. Do not use the identifiers as source for the translation, as they can be different from the actual string. In some case, the identifiers can give you the context of the string to translate.
There is a very few strings you must NOT translate at all. These are requirements from LookOut and Spid. Under "DatePictures", please avoid translating the strings entitled "YMD", "YMDhm", "YMDhms", "hm", "hms" and "international".
When a string has something such as <^0> in it, this is a placeholder for something else - a mailbox name, an e-mail address, a name. Move the placeholder where it belongs
Be careful preserving the syntax of the file. CGP is not permissive at all, a single error and the file will fail. If you need to include a double-quote character in the middle of a string, you need to escape it with a backslash ( \" ). To include a backslash, you must also escape it ( \\ ). Newline characters are possible with \n.
Once you are done with a first pass of the translation, you can try to integrate it in LookOut or Spid if you are comfortable editing the skin's settings file (strings.data). LookOut and Spid will only show language files they are instructed to know. In doubt, contact us and we'll integrate the file for you so you can test it.
This is not a requirement, but we recommend you send us your translation. We will include it in future release of LookOut, and we will maintain it. When new strings are added, you will be given the opportunity to translate them easily instead of having to manually search for untranslated strings. And if we go through a major restructuration of the language files as we did in 2004, your translation will be included in the restructuration.
Current translations
Below are the links to the "marked" translation files for each language. These files contains a ">" mark at the beginning of each line our script thinks is not translated.
Download the file, translate the marked strings and remove the ">" marks on translated strings. There is probably in your language strings that ARE the same in English, so leave the mark on these strings, and send us back the file. We will include these still-marked lines as exceptions in the script.
About half of these translations have an official maintainer. We will usually accept translations from these maintainers only. If your language is listed here and contains many errors, you are not the maintainer but wish to become it, please contact us before beginning to work on the file to avoid you unnecessary work. We will tell you if we need a new official maintainer for that language.
- Deutsch - german.data
- Español - spanish.data
- Français - french.data
- Italiano - italian.data
- 日本麊 - japanese.data
- Nederlands - dutch.data
- Norsk Bokmål - norwegian.data
- Português - portuguese.data
- Português do Brasil - portuguese-br.data
- Рђсская - russian.data
- Slovenščina - slovene.data
- Slovensky - slovak.data
- Svenska - swedish.data
- Türkçe - turkish.data
Warning: Do NOT install these files directly in your CGP server. The marks need to be cleaned up first. If you need to test your translation, pass the file through a sed command such as
sed -e s/^\x3e//g < file.data > cleaned_file.data
