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Translate the User Interface

BowPad can show the UI in various languages, but if your language of choice is not available, you can help creating it.

1. Get the required file

To translate the UI of BowPad into a specific language, you first need the file with all the strings you have to translate.

The file is stored in our source repository, you can get it from there: https://github.com/stefankueng/BowPad/blob/main/Languages/BowPad.pot.
This is the file for the development version, so if you use this to start your translation, you will have all the required strings in there.

If you're starting with your translation, then you first have to rename this file to BowPad_XX.po with XX being the ISO-639-1 language code.

2. Start translating

You could translate the strings with a simple text editor (e.g., BowPad), but I recommend a special po-file editor. For example:

Now open the po-file in your tool of choice and start translating the strings.

Careful with special chars

If you encounter special strings or chars in the original English string, make sure you copy that part without changing it. For example tokens like %ld are used to format the output. Make sure you keep those as is, otherwise you will make BowPad crash when it uses your translated string!

3. Test the translation

If you want to test the translation, you can use a tool like Resource Hacker with the *.lang file. *.lang files are resource dlls.

If you can't test your translation, you can skip to step 4.

4. Send the translated file

When you finished translating all the strings, create a new issue in our issue tracker and attach the file to it.