The i18n folder contains the internationalisation files for novelWriter. There are two types of files. The nw_XX.ts / nw_XX.qm files are for localisation of the main GUI, and the project_XX.json files are JSON files with translation maps for the novelWriter projects, used by the Build Novel Project tool.

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:

python3 setup.py qtlrelease

To add a new translation file, first add a new entry in the novelWriter.pro file under the TRANSLATIONS variable. Please use the underscore syntax for file names as the importer expects this format.

After adding the entry in the .pro file, run:

python3 setup.py qtlupdate

This will build a new 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 when prompted by Qt 5 Linguist.

When you're done editing, you can build the 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 thw .qm files to the repository. Only the .ts files are needed.

Note: This requires that you have the tools Qt 5 Linguist and pylupdate5 installed on your system.

Project Localisation

Projects can have a different language setting than the GUI itself. The files with format project_XX.json are simple translation maps for text that goes into the exported documents.

The files are loaded based on the language setting on the Build Novel Project 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.

There is no trick to using these files. 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.