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Thursday, July 18, 2013

Internationalization (aka i18n) in the new Plasma NM applet

Akademy 2013 is in its final days. Yesterday we had our day trip (or survival training day hehe, look at my Akademy 2013 photos from yesterday to see what I mean). I really liked the day trip, I like doing long walks.

At the end of the day trip we went to a restaurant to have dinner. I end up in the same table with the Italian guys. During our chat Luigi Toscano, from the KDE translation team, told me about what he did to translate the new Plasma NM applet faster. Since the new applet shares most of the strings with the current Plasma NM applet (in networkmanagement repository) he copied the .po files for Italian language from networkmanagement (current applet) to plasma-nm (new applet) and configured Lokalize to merge the strings. Sorry, I do not know the exact steps to do that in Lokalize.

Other translation teams can do the same to speed up translating Plasma NM to their languages. The same can be done when we create a new repository with code (or more precise, strings) copied from another repository. In Plasma NM case the new repository is a complete rewrite of the backend libraries and plasmoid from networkmanagement repository. However, the edit connection dialogs, which contain a lot of translatable strings, are very similar between the two repositories and share most of the strings with the current applet.