# novelWriter Internationalisation

The `i18n` folder contains the translation files for the Qt5 GUI. There are two types of files
involved: the `nw_XX.ts` and the `nw_XX.qm` files. The `nw_XX.ts` files are located in the `i18n`
folder at the root of the repository, and the `nw_XX.qm` together with the `project_XX.json` files
are located in `novelwriter/assets/i18n`. The latter are JSON translation maps for the novelWriter
projects, used by the Build Novel Project tool.

**Note**

When making a new translation, or updating an existing one, only commit the `nw_XX.ts` you have
made changes to. The `qtlupdate` command mentioned below may modify all `nw_XX.ts` slightly, but
please _don't_ commit those changes to the pull request.

## Qt GUI Localisation

The `.qm` files are the actual files used by the application to translate the GUI into another
language other than the default British English. The files are not generated by default. They can
be built with:
```bash
python3 setup.py qtlrelease
```

Before adding translations to an existing translation file, you may need to update the file against
the current source code. This is done by running the command:
```bash
python3 setup.py qtlupdate
```

If you want to update specific language files, you can add them as one or more arguments, like so:
```bash
python3 setup.py qtlupdate i18n/nw_fr.ts
```

To add a new language to the translation framework, run the command above with the file name of the
new, and not yet existing, language file. Make sure the file name is in the correct format. All
translation files must be located in the `i18n` folder, start with `nw_` and end with `.ts`. In
between goes the language code. It must be a valid ISO language code, otherwise novelWriter will
not accept the file.

For instance, to add a file for a language with language code "XX", run:
```bash
python3 setup.py qtlupdate i18n/nw_xx.ts
```

This will build a new `i18n/nw_XX.ts` file for the language you just added. The file can then be
edited with the Qt 5 Linguist application provided by Qt. This is by far easier than manually
editing the `.ts` file. Please select "English" and "United Kingdom" as the source langauge if
prompted by Qt 5 Linguist.

When you're done editing, you can build the `novelwriter/assets/i18n/nw_XX.qm` file and test it in
novelWriter. The Preferences dialog should list the newly added language, and you can select it and
test it.

Please do not submit the `.qm` files to the repository. Only the `.ts` file you just added in the
`i18n` folder is needed.

**Note**

These commands require that you have the tools Qt 5 Linguist and the PyQt5 tool `pylupdate5`
installed on your system.

For Ubuntu/Debian, run:
```bash
sudo apt install qttools5-dev-tools pyqt5-dev-tools
```

### Missing QtBase Translations

The default Qt dialogs also have translations, for instance for standard buttons like "Yes", "No",
"Ok", "Cancel", etc. Generally, these translations files are installed with the Qt libraries on
your system, and novelWriter will collect those translations from there. However, these
translations are missing for many languages.

As a starting point, there is no need to translate any entries in the `.ts` files that are under
elements starting with the letter "Q", like "QPlatformTheme", "QWizard", etc. If these turn up in
English in novelWriter after activating a translation, it means they are probably missing in the Qt
library, and you may also need to translate these.

These additional translation entries are generated from a file named `i18n/qtbase.py`, which is not
a file that novelWriter uses. It is there only to generate these additional entries for the `.ts`
files.

## Project Localisation

Projects can have a different language setting than the GUI itself. The files with format
`project_XX.json` in `novelwriter/assets/i18n` are simple translation maps for text that goes into
the exported documents generated by the Build Novel Project tool.

The files are loaded based on the language setting in the build tool. At the present time, no other
parts of the application use these files. Since these are used as replacement lookups, they are
maintained as plain JSON files. The main usage is to generate chapter headers as number words.

Adding new translations for these files is easy. Just copy the `project_en.json` file, rename it to
the appropriate language coded filename, and edit it. Please use the underscore as separator if a
language needs to be localised to a specific country under a language. The importer will for
instance look for `en_US` first, then use `en` if it is not found. If there are no matching files,
the project falls back to using English.