OK, so here is a small guide to translating Joomla 1.5 to Malayalam (or any other language)
Joomla 1.5 has the specific goal of internationalization so is completely UTF-8 and can be translated completely into any language.
Therefore translating for Joomla 1.5 is very much different from translating for 1.0.x series.
Instead of a single file for Joomla 1.0.x,
1.5 has separate language folders for Installation, Frontend and Backend. As of today only the Installation is frozen (i.e. will not be changed until the foreseeable future) and the devs are hard at work trying to freeze Frontend and Backend, but the good news is we can start now...
Lets start with the translation for
Installation..
You will find the language files that need to be translated at the
\installation\language directory inside your Joomla 1.5 RC1 / SVN download.
Step 1:Inside that folder you will see a folder for each language,
so for malayalam it would need to be created as ml-IN according to the
ISO 639-1 codes that Joomla follows for language identification.
Now our new folder is located at
\installation\language\ml-INStep 2:Copy all the files inside the en-GB folder into your folder.
The files would be
en-GB.ini [The main file containing language strings needed to be translated]
en-GB.xml [The file containing data used for identification of the language , author , copyright etc]
index.html [To prevent Apache from returning index of.. results]
Step 3:Rename en-GB.ini to ml-IN.ini and en-GB.xml to ml-IN.xml
Step 4:Start translating..
Open up the ml-IN.ini file with a UTF-8 capable editor.
Start from line number 7 by translating the the part after the equals (=) sign with the equivalent translation for Malayalam.
example. ADMIN=Admin
The part after the equals needs to be translated i.e. Admin needs to be replaced by its equivalent in Malayalam.
Hindi/Devanagari is done by this way:
ADMIN=संचालनThis needs to be done with all of the file to get a complete translation for Installation for J 1.5.
During translation you will notice that there are some HTML tags inside the language strings, try to keep them like that.
Also you might find that some words used in the file do not have exact meanings in your language, its best to keep them like they are or better translate the words phonetically in your language.
Once you are done with this we move to the next file. ml-IN.xml
Step: 5The XML file generally contains data used for identification.
here is the one for Bengali.
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<metafile version="1.5" client="installation" >
<name>Bengali (India)</name>
<version>1.5.0</version>
<creationDate>May 2007</creationDate>
<author>Romit Chatterjee</author>
<authorEmail>romit@romitchat.com</authorEmail>
<authorUrl>www.joomla.org</authorUrl>
<copyright>(C) 2005 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.</copyright>
<license>http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html GNU/GPL</license>
<description>Bengali language file for web installer</description>
<metadata>
<name>Bengali (India)</name>
<tag>bn-IN</tag>
<rtl>0</rtl>
<locale>bn_IN.utf8,ben_IN, bng_IN, bn_IN, bn-IN, ben-IN, bng-IN, bn, in, ben, bng, bengali, bengali-in, ind, india</locale>
<winCodePage>iso-8859-1</winCodePage>
<backwardLang>Bengali India</backwardLang>
</metadata>
<params />
</metafile>
As you can see the XML tags are self explanatory. and you can change them easily
A few things need to be noted here. the
has to be
http://www.joomla.org for installation.
For frontend/backend you can have your own url's
The first locale should be ml_IN.utf8 ..
That should give you guys a head start ..
let me know if you need any help..
I will follow up this post with instructions for translating frontend and backend soon..
Discuss, Share your thoughts, Ask questions about translation for Joomla 1.5 at http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,201451.0.html
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