| 86 | | 1. Read the [http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/linguist-manual-3.html Qt Linguist manual] to get general information about translating Qt applications. Pay special attention to understanding the status of translatable items (unfinished, obsolete). |
| 87 | | 2. Preserve spaces around (and between) words if they are used for justification purposes. Examples of such items are category names in the global and VM settings dialogs where leading and trailing space characters serve as horizontal item margins. Also, a leading space in the translatable item is often used as a separator from the preceding word that will appear after string concatenation, and therefore needs to be preserved. |
| 88 | | 3. Translate only human-readable words and sentences. Leave HTML markup and other sorts of special characters untouched -- otherwise you may completely break the text appearance in the UI. |
| 89 | | 4. Don't translate items starting with the {{{#}}} (hash) sign in contexts {{{VBoxGlobalSettingsDlg}}} and {{{VBoxVMSettingsDlg}}}, such as {{{#general}}}, {{{#input}}} and so on. They are responsible for the settings category hyper-link feature on the VM Details page and translating them will break this feature. |
| 90 | | 5. When Qt Linguist shows the source text of the translatable item, it uses special text fragments inside it to mark unprintable characters, for example: {{{(new-line)}}} for new-line marks or {{{(sp)}}} for ambiguous space characters. However, if you copy the source text to the translation field (to use it as a template for translation), Qt Linguist will not replace these special fragments back with real control/formatting characters -- they will remain {{{(new line}}}} and {{{(sp)}}} in the translation and will appear like that in the GUI as well. Therefore, you should be careful and always replace them with the corresponding formatting characters (new-line or space) manually. |
| | 86 | 1. '''Read''' the [http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/linguist-manual-3.html Qt Linguist manual] to get general information about translating Qt applications. Pay special attention to understanding the status of translatable items (unfinished, obsolete). |
| | 87 | 2. '''Preserve spaces''' around (and between) words if they are used for justification purposes. Examples of such items are category names in the global and VM settings dialogs where leading and trailing space characters serve as horizontal item margins. Also, a leading space in the translatable item is often used as a separator from the preceding word that will appear after string concatenation, and therefore needs to be preserved. |
| | 88 | 3. Translate only '''human-readable''' words and sentences. Leave HTML markup and other sorts of special characters untouched -- otherwise you may completely break the text appearance in the UI. |
| | 89 | 4. '''Don't translate''' items starting with the '''{{{#}}} (hash)''' sign in contexts {{{VBoxGlobalSettingsDlg}}} and {{{VBoxVMSettingsDlg}}}, such as {{{#general}}}, {{{#input}}} and so on. They are responsible for the settings category hyper-link feature on the VM Details page and translating them will break this feature. |
| | 90 | 5. When Qt Linguist shows the source text of the translatable item, it uses special text fragments inside it to mark unprintable characters, for example: '''{{{(new-line)}}}''' for new-line marks or '''{{{(sp)}}}''' for ambiguous space characters. However, if you copy the source text to the translation field (to use it as a template for translation), Qt Linguist will not replace these special fragments back with real control/formatting characters -- they will remain {{{(new line}}}} and {{{(sp)}}} in the translation and will appear like that in the GUI as well. Therefore, you should be careful and always replace them with the corresponding formatting characters (new-line or space) manually. |
| | 91 | 6. In general, it's '''not recommended''' to translate '''{{{Ctrl+<latin_letter>}}}''' shortcuts (for example, Ctrl+S used to open the VM Settings Dialog) because they are intended to be language neutral and should have the same action regardless of the selected UI language. Translate them only if there is a very special reason to do so in your language; otherwise simply leave the original. Note that the action name starting with a different letter or having a different underscored ({{{Alt+<any_letter>}}}) accelerator in your language is not a valid reason to translate the corresponding {{{Ctrl+<latin_letter>}}} shortcut. |
