You are most welcome to translate Rapid Photo Downloader into your own language! Through your help, the program will become easier to use for more people. You will be mentioned in the translation credits in the program's About dialog window.

Translations are being handled by Launchpad's web-based service. All you need is a Launchpad account and a web browser. Learn more about this service.

Rapid Photo Downloader is currently being translated into:

• 1French
• 2Spanish
• 3Polish
• 4Finnish
• 5German
• 6Hungarian
• 7Italian
• 8Swedish
• 9Russian
• 10Czech
• 11Slovak
• 12Dutch
• 13Serbian
• 14Ukrainian
• 15Chinese (simplified)
• 16Bulgarian
• 17Japanese
• 18Occitan (post 1500)
• 19Persian
• 20Portuguese (Brazilian)
• 21Turkish
• 22Norwegian Nynorsk
• 23Norwegian Bokmal
• 24Croatian
• 25Romanian
• 26Portuguese
• 27Indonesian
• 28Danish

First, if you do not have one already, you need an account with Launchpad. Set one up here. It's quick and easy.

Once you have created your Launchpad account, I suggest you tell Launchpad which languages you understand. This is optional but it makes things simpler. You can set this through your profile page. You should also join the project's translators team on Launchpad, so you can be on the mailing list.

Once you have set up your languages, go to the translations page for Rapid Photo Downloader. Here you can see which languages Rapid Photo Downloader has already been translated into, and the status of these translations. This is also where you can begin to make your own contributions.

You may find it helpful to consult the documentation if some of the program's features are unfamiliar or unclear.

Some things that need to be translated will include messages you may not have seen in the program before, such as error messages, or messages notifying that the user's preferences have been upgraded. The set of items that need to be translated include:

• 1User interface elements like menu items, buttons and window titles
• 2Error messages and warnings displayed in the program's error window
• 3Command line output

Some of the text requiring translation includes some codes that have special meaning in the programming language Rapid Photo Downloader is written in, Python. These codes are very important to the successful operation of the program. If they are modified or left out, the program may crash. It is therefore essential that when you translate the application, these codes are not modified or removed.

At times, for the translation to make sense, the codes may need to be moved in the sentence. That is ok. This is the reason why you see the codes—it might be necessary to move the them in order for the text to be successfully translated.

This is a simple example of some actual text from the program, with the relevant codes highlighted in red:

The elements in red should not be modified or removed, but the rest should be translated. The elements <i> and </i> are used for formatting. They are HTML codes that make the text appear in italics. Formatting codes like this should not be moved, removed, or modified in any way.

The %s signifies to python that this is the place where some text will be substituted when the program is run. This should never be removed or modified, but it may be moved in the sentence if the translation makes more sense that way (for example, with a language written from right to left).

Here is a more complex example:

In this example, instead of a simple %s code, a name has been incorporated in each code element. For example, %(source)s contains the name source. As above, these codes should not be removed or modified, but they can be moved in the sentence whenever necessary.

If anything is unclear, then please feel free to contact the developer.

You can test your translation without installing a new version of the program on your system. In fact, I suggest you do not install a different version simply to test a translation (there is no uninstaller). Instead, you can run a new copy locally, for instance in a sub directory of your home directory.

There are four easy steps:

• 1Create a copy of the program's source code in a local directory
• 2Get your language's latest po file from Launchpad
• 3Generate a mo file for your language and install it on your system
• 4Run the application to ensure everything is working as expected

Most of the time, to test translations it is necessary to get the latest version of Rapid Photo Downloader from its code respository. Ensure bazaar is installed on your system, then get the latest version by executing:

If you are unable to install bzr, you can download the latest tarball and test that. Click here to download it.

In the directory where you created the branch (i.e. where the script rapid-photo-downloader is located), you should create a directory structure like this (using the Polish language as an example):

This example assumes that your username is user and that you created a branch directly under your home directory. You will need to replace pl with the appropriate code for your language.

Tip: The command mkdir -p locale/pl/LC_MESSAGES will create all three directories with one command.

The next step is to install your language's po file into the po directory of the source code.

Click here to get your language's po file. You should select Selected files and choose your language. It may take a few minutes for Launchpad to generate the po file and make it available for download.

When you have downloaded the po file from Launchpad, save it in the po directory in the program's source code, renaming it (again using Polish as an example) from po_rapid-photo-downloader-pl.po to pl.po.

If you need to overwrite any existing po file, that's ok.

This step is simple. From within the source code directory, as super user execute the following command (again substituting pl for your language). Please note this command should be on one line:

The code tests for the presence of the environment variable LOCALEDIR to determine where it should look for translation data. To test your translations, you should set this to be the directory in which translations are found. If it is not set, then the program will use the system-wide data (typically found in /usr/share/locale).

You can run your local copy of the application to test your transition by executing:

It is important to remember the ./, or else you may end up running another version of Rapid Photo Downloader that might already be installed on your system.

Things to look for include:

• 1Ensure the Preferences dialog window is not made too wide by excessively long names for the tabs
• 2Check all output on the command line, looking especially for any code errors that may have been caused by a mistake in the translation