Lifelines was gettextized in Feb of 2002. lifelines-3.0.12 was submitted to Free Translation Project on May 12, 2002 Included versions are: sv: Swedish (Thanks to Jens Arvidsson) de: German (Thanks to Carl Becker) Versions under private development: fr: French If you would like to volunteer to help with a new or existing translation, please contact the Free Translation Project http://www.iro.montreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML except for the de & fr translations, for which send email to the long-running lifelines mailing list, LINES-L, which is explained at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~nozell/lines-l Issues for translators: gettext If you are not familiar with gettext, it would be beneficial to look not only at the ABOUT-NLS file (in the root of lifelines), but also the gettext manual, which may be seen at http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/index.html Free Translation Project The Translation Project is a collaborative effort to translate free software packages: http://www.iro.montreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML Menus. The large menus (main menu, utility menu, etc) still have hardcoded letters, so that "u" always invokes the utility menu from the main menu, and this cannot be changed at present. The list browse screen also has fixed menu letters. Widths. The main menu has room for 70 characters after the spaces of each item (eg, after "u " you may use 70 characters). Submenus must be smaller. The small menus at the bottom of browse screens (person browse, family browse, tandem browses, other browse, but not list browse) draw their menu assignment letters from the actual text, so that the the letter codes may be localized. Note that you must be familiar with the lifelines menu screens to localize these letters; if not, simply leave the leading letter codes as they are, and localize the subsequent explanatory test. Eg, for "e Edit top person", leave the leading e as it is, unless you have worked out an entire set of localized letters for this menu (this particular menu item is used in both the tandem person menu and the tandem family menu). The column widths of these flexible menu items are also figured dynamically from the width of the widest menu item. NB: These texts are all drawn from menuitem.c, whereas the fixed menu texts are all drawn from messages.c. Months: Month short & long names are explicitly in the translations, rather than being drawn from strftime, because the package is used on MSWin^h^h^h^h^h platforms with poor libc support. May: The month of May has the same short & long form in English, so the short form is marked as "may**", so that it may be localized. Do not include asterisks in your localized version. French Republic months: The names of the French Republic months (eg, Vendemiaire) should probably stay in French. printf-style format specifiers (%s and %d): The order of the printf specifiers must be preserved. The glibc extensions to allow reordering these cannot be used, because this will fail on systems without glibc (and if a %s and a %d are reversed, it will crash). For example, (%s: %d spouse(s), %d child(ren)) All translations must have the %s first, then the %d for spouses, then the one for children. If this is a problem in a particular case, please post a message to the LINES-L list. If the specifiers are %1 and %2, then they may be moved around in order. (These are ones handled specially to allow reordering.)