Better way to translate the language??

wmjordan

Hi, I am a Chinese user and I am using kx 3538.

I guess that the Chinese translation work has been put down for a while. I would like to pick it up and do a better job. However, I can't find a language file in the Program Files/Kxproject.

Then I dug into the kxskin.kxs file, and found that it is an RAR file. I opened that file with WinRAR and saw a file named "lang.ini". Obviously it is the thing. However, the file contains ALL languages! The all in one is quite difficult to work with. Since I will have to scroll it up and down, first looking for the English string and then looking for the Chinese one, and adding the translation if it is not there. The job is really horrible to scroll so much.

Is there a tool to do this work?

Nando Dominguez

>>Then I dug into the kxskin.kxs file, and found that it is an RAR file. I opened that file with WinRAR and saw a file named "lang.ini". Obviously it is the thing.

Hi wmjordan!
Yes, it is the thing. But there is no need to scroll the whole file up and down, just find these inputs: 404=??? (for traditional chinese) or 804=??? (for simplified chinese) in the Edit menu, in order to find missing translations. This is the best way, as far as I know.

Don't forget to delete "#" at the beginning of them, otherwise it will not work.

Once it is finished, compress the "lang.ini" file and send it to Eugene at kxproject@yandex.ru

Also you might integrate it back into the "kxskin.kxs" file and replace the one in C:\Windows\system32 (don't forget to back it up first) in order to check it (sometimes a translation may be too long and something may be not shown).

It may seem too much work, but it's not. And looks great when it's done

Good luck!

Nando

barlon

你好
Wouldn't it be possible to just open two instances of the .ini-file? One for english reference and one for chinese editing?

Nando Dominguez

>>Wouldn't it be possible to just open two instances of the .ini-file? One for english reference and one for chinese editing?

Barlon, actually there is no need for that, because the english reference is allways writen the first of all. So when you find a missing translation you can read the english one just a few lines above.

Nando

barlon

'see

wmjordan

I have actually finished the translation. However, when I recompressed the kxskin.kxs file in system32, with WinRAR 3.5 beta, and then restarted kxMixer, all strings failed to be loaded. I think that WinRAR 3.5 has used a slightly sophisticated algorithm to recompress the file.

To prove this, I restored the kxskin.kxs file, and was sure that the restored one could be loaded. I uncompressed the restored working one into a temp folder, and recompressed them with WinRAR, standard compression, no solid archiving, and then renamed the recompressed one back to kxskin.kxs, copied it to system32 folder. After restarting kxMixer, it failed to load the one compressed by WinRAR 3.5 beta too.

How can I workaround this without rolling back to previous versions of WinRAR?

I also hope that Eugene can split the lang.ini file into several files, to facilitate the translation work, and avoid the issue that one language might mess up another due to the well-known file encoding problems.

Daniel Drummond

Use winrar 2.0 or just drag the file to the kxskin.rar file and it'll work.

wmjordan

The translation update has been finished now!

It is never an easy task to scroll up and down for English strings and other translations stuffed in one file! My translated Chinese string file, is approximately 20kB only. However, the whole string file is overwhelmingly sized at 565kB!!

Having SOOOOO many languages in one file brings obstacle for translation. I hope that I haven't slipped my mouse so that other languages would got messed up. Separating languages into corresponding files can avoid this issue. And the translation can be done much easier and error-proof.

wmjordan

Yes, I dragged the file into the kxskin.rar at the first time when I was finished, but it failed.

Daniel Drummond

Eugene probably has a better way to do it. I think that because imagine when he receives new translations from each language: will he have to copy and paste them to a single file line by line? I don't think so... Maybe some programmer around could make a small application or batch file to allow on the lines from a specific language to be seen (besides english) and them to be re-integrated to the original file (or something like that...).

bardnone

Just try with editplus
It's useful

wmjordan

Yeah, I am using EditPlus.
The problem now is to repack the ini file back into the skin file.
I have already emailed Eugene with the translated file.

Eugene Gavrilov

the problem is related to the vocabulary size specified in WinRar settings
please make sure you use <=512kB vocabulary

Eugene Gavrilov

as for special tools, actually I use my own utility to merge the files, so, in the future I might consider separating the language files... however, this will make some things less easy -- e.g. you won't be able to track the changes in the English file...

E.

wmjordan

Eugene, please do NOT worry about tracking changes.

I am also the Chinese translator of PhotoLine32, an image processor software developed by two German brothers. The software contains six language files which size at 210KB (the translated one)--10 times larger than the Chinese translation of the kxProject driver.

When I translate the language files for PhotoLine32, I open the corresponding files both in English and Chinese, disable the line-wrapping feature, and tile them vertically side-by-side in EditPlus. By paging down those two files simultaneously, I can find out the inserted or deleted lines in the English file, so I can add or remove the corresponding translation in the Chinese one.

It is somewhat hard and time-consuming at the first time, but after that, it does not take too long when a new version is released and requires translation updating.


-