Translators
A group of volunteers is translating the free Audacity sound editor into many different languages. If you would like to help, please join the audacity-translation mailing list and introduce yourself.
The translation effort is now focused on Audacity 1.3. Translations from previous versions of Audacity have been imported and need to be updated.
Resources for Translators
- Mailing list and archives
- Latest audacity.pot file (last updated 2009/06/30)
- Latest audacity_website.pot file (last updated 2009/07/00)
- wxWidgets i18n
Translation Instructions
To start a new translation, download the POT file above. (If the links only produce text in the browser, right-click or control-click and "Save target as" or "Save link as"). Rename the POT to "audacity.po" (or "audacity_website.po" for web site translation) before starting your translation.
To edit an existing translation, use the links below to download the PO file for your language:
On the "log" page for your language, click the "download" link at the top, just to right of "Links to HEAD" (right-click or control-click and save the target or link if necessary).
These programs can create and edit PO files:
- poEdit for Windows and Unix.
- KBabel for KDE.
- GNU gettext is standard on most Unix systems. It includes a PO mode for the Emacs text editor.
To start a new translation in poEdit, open the PO file, then:
- Catalog > Settings: Fill in the settings. Set the target language in the Language menu.
- When you File > Save, it writes both the PO and MO files.
To test a new translation in Audacity:
- Create a new directory in audacity/languages named as the code for the target language. The abbreviations are shown at http://www.poedit.net/translations.php. For example, the code for Tamil is "ta", so create "audacity/languages/ta".
- Copy audacity.mo into that new directory, for example, into "audacity/languages/ta".
- Open Audacity and in Preferences: Interface, the new language should now appear in the Language menu. Choose it, quit, then restart and you should see your translations.
Send completed PO files to Buanzo.
Notes
In poEdit, make sure to set the "charset" option correctly. Otherwise, poEdit will not save any translations with non-English characters.
Strings like "&File" and "New &Audio Track" are menu items. The letter after the "&" symbol is used as an access key on the keyboard.
"Import Audio...\tCtrl+i" is also a menu item. The \t stands for a tab character, which separates the menu text from its keyboard shortcut.
You will find many strings like "There were %d buffer underruns, last near %lf seconds." The % signs mark places where numbers or names will be inserted into the string. For example, this string might become "There were 4 buffer underruns, last near 3.01 seconds." If you change the order of the the % markers in a string, add "1$" after the percent sign that used to be first, "2$" after the percent sign that used to be second, and so on. For example:
"The buffer underrun near %2$lf seconds was the last of %1$d."
