Aegis Localization

The error messages in Aegis have been internationalized. This means that you can read error messages in your native language, if a translation has been provided. (Also known as localization.) The following table lists the available translations, and gives credit to the volunteer translators who generously donated their time to perform the translation.

If you are able to translate the error messages into another language, please contact Peter Miller and he will tell you how it is done.

deGerman Ralf Fassel <ralf@akutech.de>
enEnglish Peter Miller <millerp@canb.auug.org.au>
frFrench Jerry Pendergraft <jerry@endocardial.com>
nlDutch Jelle Boomstra <nietsch@dds.nl>
ruRussian Alexey Voinov <voins@voins.program.ru>

Instructions for Translators

If you would like to translate the error messages, look up the two-letter abbreviation of the language you are going to translate the error messages to. The rest of these instructions will call it xx.

In the source tarball, you will see a directory called lib/en/LC_MESSAGES which contains some .po files. These are the text form of the message catalogues. You can view them with a simple text editor.

Create a new directory for your translations, and copy the English messages into it. 

mkdir lib/xx/LC_MESSAGES
cp lib/en/LC_MESSAGES/*.po lib/xx/LC_MESSAGES
Now you need to edit each of the lib/xx/LC_MESSAGES/*.po files, replacing the msgstr strings with suitable translations. Leave the msgid strings and the comments untranslated. These are text files, you can edit them with a simple text editor. GNU Emacs has a PO mode to make this easier.

The GNU Gettext sources have fairly good documentation about this process.

If you want to test your translations, you need to "compile" the text into the binary form used by the gettext() system call. This is done using the msgfmt(1) program from the GNU Gettext package. To see you new translations in action, you create a ${prefix}/lib/aegis/xx/LC_MESSAGES directory and arrange for the msgfmt output to be placed in it. Some of the messages are hard to trigger, don't expect complete test coverage.

There are almost 600 error messages. If you average 1 message every 2 minutes, this is approximately 20 hours work. The German translation, for example, required around 12 hours.

When you are done translating, email the results to Peter Miller and they will be included in the next release of Aegis (and mentioned on this web page).

The beautiful graphics on this web site are by Grégory Delattre.

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