Transana is written in English, and English is the only language in which we can offer program support. However, there has been enough international interest in the program that we have made it possible for people to translate Transana's program prompts into other languages. If you would like to volunteer to translate Transana into another language, please contact the developers by sending an e-mail to dwoods *at* wcer *dot* wisc *dot* edu.

A few dialog boxes in Transana are actually provided by the underlying operating system, such as the File Open dialog box and the Printer Setup dialog box. These dialogs use the language assigned by the operating system, and there's nothing Transana can do to change it; if the operating system is English, then those few dialogs will appear in English.

Optimum internationalization may be limited by one or more of the following factors:

• wxPython may not support the language. This means that some prompts and error messages would display in English, though the majority of the prompts would be in the local language. wxPython supports 22 languages.
  
• MySQL may not support the language. Error messages relating to the Transana database would be in English; all others would be in the local language. MySQL supports 21 languages (not completely overlapping with those supported by wxPython).
  
• Neither wxPython nor MySQL support the language. Most of the the prompts would be in the local language, but some error messages would appear in English.

*A user has already volunteered to work on this translation. If you would like to help, contact the Transana developer.

How to Translate Transana into Another Language

The translation process is straightforward.

1. Contact the developers, letting us know what language you would like to volunteer to translate. (We are very sorry that we cannot pay anyone for their translation work, but we have no funds to do that.) The Transana team will coordinate the translation efforts for all languages so that we don't have a lot of duplication of effort. If someone else has already volunteered to do the translation of the language you want, please contact me anyway. There may be a role for you to play in the process.

2. We will e-mail you a "portable object" file that contains all of Transana's prompts, prepared for translation. There are currently between 725 and 800 program prompts, ranging from a word or two to about three sentences. An initial estimate is that it will take people about 10 to 12 hours to translate these prompts. (Please let us know if this is not accurate!)

3. You can use a program designed to facilitate program translations, such as poEdit to perform the translation reasonably easily. poEdit is an Open Source translation aid that can show you a list of all the prompts (including indications of what has not been translated yet and what has changed since the last translation) and all you need to do is select each prompt and translate it.

4. You then e-mail the "portable object" file back to me. We create a "machine object" file that is a specially formatted form of the translations. We add this file, plus similar ones for wxPython and MySQL (if they exist) to the Transana installer. We also add your name to the About Box and to the Transana Web Page on Internationalization (see above). Also, if possible, we instruct the installer to enable the language itself, so that users can install Transana in the appropiate language. (Installer language support may be somewhat uneven. For example, though they support Catalan, they don't have an up-to-date Spanish translation and we've had to use "Argentinean Spanish" instead.)

5. We then send you a URL for a custom build of Transana with your language enabled. You download and run the program to see your translation in context. How much revision you will want to do at this point is up to you. It might take only an hour to review the main Transana forms and decide you did well enough, or it might take several hours to revise your "portable object" translation file for reprocessing. Either way, this is a critical step, and we won't release your translation until we get your post-review sign-off.

6. Most likely, once you finish your translation, I'll pretty quickly come back and ask you to update the translation for new prompts. Transana is under constant development, and we are working on new features while you are working on your translation. It usually takes a final round to synchronize the translation with the development version of the software before the first release containing your translation can be distributed.

7. We will contact you in the future, requesting that you update your translation as the program changes and as we add or edit program prompts. These future edits are likely to be very small, with only a few dozen prompts or changes at any given time. poEdit makes it very easy to identify what has changed, making the updating process quite easy.

Things to Keep in Mind While Translating

Program prompts are more than just text. They include special codes within the text that are meaningful to the program. This section is designed to describe those special codes so you know how to work with them. (By and large, you simply leave them alone. However, it is important that you be sure not to remove them, as that could cause Transana to crash.)

Note that you should never edit the text files to alter the English portion of the prompts file. The English phrase matches what is in Transana's source code. If you alter it, then the lookup fails, and your translation never gets inserted.