Help menu in Mac OS X

This is a translation issue. But it also a developer issue. However, I'm 
not a developer. Therefore I write to this list. I hope that is all right.
 
When translating the Amaya dialogs, I also translated the Help menu 
(<label define="Help_">). But as I tested my translation out, I saw that 
Amaya displayed two Help menus: one translated Help menu - where the 
actual help was located, and another Help menu - in English, which was 
emtpy. This is, of course, a bug. It turned out to be the same issue for 
the allready existing localizations of Amaya also - except for the 
English localization. (I tested the German localization.)

However, I found a way to avoid this problem. It has two steps:

   1. For Mac OS X, do _not_ translate the <label define="Help_">
      resource. (Doing this, will ensure that there will always be only
      one Help menu - though it will also always be in English.)
   2. For Mac OS X, _do_ place an empty language project folder inside
      <Amaya.app/Contents/Resources/>. A langauge project folder is a
      folder that begins with the name of the language and ends with
      .lproj. (For example, I placed 'no.proj' there for my Norwegian
      Mac OS X.  I also exerimented with 'de.lproj' for German Amaya,
      and so on, and it worked very well!)

In Mac OS X, the choice of interface language is supposed to be 
automatic  - as in Windows. On should not need to log into the 
Preference of the particular application in order to choose language. 
However, it is still possible to overrun the global language 
preferences, so that you can choose a different language in a particular 
application.

And by placing these xx.lproj files inside Amaya.app/Content/Resources, 
Amaya will create a language selection menu in the «Show info» dialog of 
the Amaya app. Here the user and enable/disable the language used for 
Amaya. However, if you only do what I told in step 1 and 2 above, then 
this language menu will only govern the language of the Help and the 
Window menu + some other global Mac OS X menus. But even if it doesn't 
do more than that, it is still a useful feature. (I hope, of course, 
that the programmers can enable this feature in full, though! I imagin 
that it should not be more difficult than placing  forinstasnc the 3 
French language files into a 'fr.lproj' folder inside the Resources 
folder, and thenafter to make [hard] links from its current position (in 
config/ folder).)

Mac OS X supports ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2. Thus, for the currently 
supported languages of Amaya, one would need these folders (plus one or 
two (Bokmål/Nynorsk) folders for Norwegian, which I am translating):

    en.lproj   
    fr.lproj     
    de.lproj
    it.lproj
    tr.lproj
    es.lproj
    pt.lproj
    fi.lproj
    ru.lproj
    hu.lproj
    ka.lproj
    zh_CN.lproj
    zh_TW.lproj
    no.lproj

Note: one can also type the name of the language directly: 
English.lproj, French.lproj etc. One can even use (some) localized 
names, such as Deutch.lproj instead of de.lproj. This is of course more 
userfriendly, and I therefore think I would recommend doing that.
-- 
leif,
oslo

Received on Wednesday, 24 January 2007 00:44:40 UTC