evennia/locale/README

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Evennia translations
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This folder contains data for translating Evennia's 
core messages to different languages. Note that commands
are not covered here at this time. Note that translations
only cover "core" texts (things "hard coded" from the server)
and not command returns - the latter each game developer needs to 
translate manually (since commands will most likely be 
customized for each game anyway). 


Changing server language
------------------------

First you must compile all available languages. Place yourself
in Evennia's root (the one  containing locale/) and run:

django-admin.py compilemessages

(it could also be just django-admin depending on your system)
This will compile the language .po files into .mo files which
Evennia/Django uses at runtime.

To configure the server to use a different language,
edit your settings file and add the following: 

 USE_I18N = True 
 LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'

Change 'en' to a translated language code (see which are available
in evennia/locale/). Restart Server and Portal. 



Creating a new translation
--------------------------

evennia/locale/ contains translation strings for the core server.

First look to see if there is already data files for 
your language available to improve upon. If not, you can
start translate for a new language by placing yourself in 
Evennia's root directory and run 

  django-admin makemessages -l <language code>

where <language code> is the two-letter locale code for the language 
you want, like "sv" for Swedish, "es" for Spanish and so on. A new
folder with the language code will have appeared. 

Note that the command django-admin may not be available in your path. 
If so, the easiest way is to search for it (it sits in the django 
source tree) and run it as "python <absolute-path>/django-admin.py".


Doing a translation / improving an existing one
-----------------------------------------------

Go to locale/<language code>/LC_MESSAGES/and edit the *.po file 
you find there by translating each given English string to the equivalent in 
the other language. Editing the raw file manually is not necessary -- search 
the web and you'll find many open-source graphical .po editors available.

Once you have modified the .po file to add/correct the translation therein,
you must compile it for efficiency. Back in Evennia's root directory, run

  django-admin compilemessages

This will create a binary .mo file which is what Evennia will use. 


Let us know! 
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If you did a new translation or improved an old one, please consider sending
us your updated .po file so we can include it with the main Evennia distribution!