Translation of the user guide

[Cedric-1515]

Hi,
I'm a new user of novelWrite and already enthusiastically using it. Talked about it to a couple of people who are not speaking English and they remain kind of reluctant to skip from their usual commercial docx software to an open source text editor.
Is there anyone willing or planning to translate the user guide?
I can contribute to a French version.

[vkbo]

Someone contributed a French translation of the docs a couple of years ago, but unfortunately keeping up with it is a huge task as it changes a fair bit between each release.

Ideally, a translated documentation would be nice though. The translation tool novelWriter uses is limited by word count, and there is no way the documentation is anywhere near small enough, so I'm uncertain what would be the best approach. Publishing alternative PDF docs could be one option, but without a tool that checks what paragraphs need re-translating for each version, the task is pretty big. If you know of a suitable tool, I'm happy to look into it.

I could set up a shadow repository where translated version of the documentation lives, and automatically build PDFs, so that part is definitely doable.

[Cedric-1515]

Please keep me posted about it.
In the meantime, I'll start translating on a simple file as I have some free time I can dedicate to it right now and we see later how to find a solution.
Looking forward to contributing to novelWriter's documentation!

[vkbo]

Well, translating files directly will not be very usable. The framework for translations uses files like this as the source files, which are the ones that need to be translated:

[vkbo]

It's easy to generate the files, which I've already done. I've attached them here: gettext.zip

They are probably easier to translate with a suitable tool if you can find one. I have never translated this type of files before, so not very familiar with them.

[Cedric-1515]

I will make some research during the weekend.

One last question, if I don't find any tool for it, would it make it useful for you if I edit directly the .pot files with notepad, and then sending back to you a zipped folder with the translated files?

[vkbo]

You need to generate the .po files for the relevant language. See point 4 here. I can easily do that for you as well, but it looks very clunky having to do all of this in notepad. There is a tool for it called poedit available that does all that directly from the .pot files.