DBGL Translation

How to get started

DBGL has support for multiple languages, and with your help maybe even more languages will be available! Follow these steps:

• Download the latest full Windows, Linux or Mac package suitable for your system
• Also download the latest language archive file
• Extract the DBGL archive to whatever location
• Extract the language file i18n.zip to the same location. You should have a newly create plugins/i18n directory in the DBGL folder. This plugins/i18n contains all language files (*.properties)
• To add support for a new language:
  • Create a copy of 'MessagesBundle.properties' file and name it 'MessagesBundle_xx.properties', where xx is the iso code for the language you selected. If you don't know the iso code, you can find a list here. In our example, it would be 'MessagesBundle_es.properties' for Spanish.
  • Startup DBGL and open the 'Settings' screen
  • Set 'language' to the language that you want to add support for, for example 'Spanish', and press OK
  • Close DBGL
  • Open the new file in your favorite editor
• Or, to make additions or changes to an existing language file:
  • Simply open the existing file in your favorite editor. Lines that require translation (because DBGL was updated or changed) are down at the very bottom of the file.
• You will see that each line (except for the comments that start with #) follows the 'name = value' convention. You will have to write a translation for the 'value' part in each line, you shouldn't alter the 'name'. A few remarks though:
  • When you want to use a quote, you'll have to write it 2 times!
  • Text-lines may contain new-line codes, which should be written as \n
  • Some lines contain dynamic parts looking like {0} or {1,number,integer}. You should keep those in your translation! The lines themselves should be translated, but the part between the curly braces should remain in English.
  • If you don't know how to translate a certain line, just leave it in English

How to test

When you want to test your hard work, just start DBGL and observe the beauty.

There is one catch though; If you had to use special characters in your translation, outside of the ASC-II character set (such as when writing Chinese), your file has to be converted first. Sun provides a tool called native2ascii to do just that. Usage instructions can be found here. The tool is part of the Java SE Development Kit (JDK) wich you can find here. DBGL can only use the converted file, so it would probably be wise to rename your original file first, and output to a file named 'MessagesBundle_xx.properties'. You can also ask me to perform the conversion for you.

How to make everybody happy

When you think it all looks OK, please send me your translated file so I can provide it to other users. Thank you!

If you need help, just send me an email !