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novelWriter Internationalisation (i18n)

The maintenance of translations has been moved to the Crowdin service. The translation strings can be edited there at the novelWriter project page. However, please read the Translation Guidelines section below.

You can still use the manual approach listed below, and then upload the file through the website's interface. The translation strings for that language will then be updated and queued for approval.

To verify a language file translated through the Crowdin tool, download and extract it into the i18n folder in the novelWriter source and follow the instructions in Generate an Updated Translation File below.

Translation Guidelines

When contributing translations, keep the following things in mind.

  • For descriptive labels and dialog boxes, make sure you do not change the meaning of the text when you translate it from English. The user must receive the same instructions or information regardless of language. This is important, otherwise the documentation will be inconsistent with the user interface and it will become a lot more difficult to handle user issues and questions.
  • If you think a label or description is misleading or incomplete, please file an issue report. The correct way to handle such changes is to change the text in the code first, which will then be forwarded to all translators such that the GUI is consistent across all languages.
  • For very short labels, like button labels. it may be fine to replace the word with a similar word, but only as long as the user understands what it is supposed to do. Some buttons and tabs have limited space. If necessary, it is OK to use abbreviations.

Direct Approach Using Qt Linguist

Here you will find instructions for translating novelWriter to a new language directly using Qt Linguist, or updating the translations for an already existing supported language.

There are two areas relevant to localisation:

  • The Qt GUI translation files, which consists of nw_XX.ts files. This is the bulk of the translation work.
  • The project_XX.json files. See Project Localisation below.

The XX in the file name corresponds to the language and country code for the translation. For instance en_GB for British English.

Qt GUI Localisation

You will need the translation tool Qt Linguist on your system.

For Ubuntu/Debian, run:

sudo apt install qttools5-dev-tools

See also Qt Linguist Manual: Translators.

Workflow

Here's an overview of the localisation workflow:

  1. First, create a new branch off of main, and there, generate a new nw_XX.ts translation file.
  2. Load the translation file in Qt Linguist. Translate and save your changes.
  3. Generate the nw_XX.qm file.
  4. Run the application and verify your changes. Iterate from step 2.
  5. Once finished, commit your changes and submit your pull request.

When you want to translate new changes, again create a new branch off of main and re-generate the translation file. Continue from step 2.

Generate an Updated Translation File

The i18n folder at the root of the repository contains the nw_XX.ts translation files.

Whether to add a new language to the translation framework, or to update the file against the current source code, you must first run the qtlupdate command:

python3 pkgutils.py qtlupdate i18n/nw_XX.ts

The file name must be in the correct format. All translation files must be located in the i18n folder, start with nw_ and end with .ts. In between goes the language and country code. It must be a valid ISO language code, otherwise novelWriter will not accept the file.

For instance, the French translation uses the language code fr_FR, so its translation file will be nw_fr_FR.ts

Note: The qtlupdate command needs the lupdate tool provided by PyQt6, which uses the latest TS file format. On Debian/Ubuntu it is provided by the package pyqt6-dev-tools.

Edit the Translation File in Qt Linguist

The i18n/nw_XX.ts file can be edited with the Qt Linguist application provided by Qt. This is by far easier than manually editing the .ts file.

Please select "English" and "United Kingdom" as the source language if prompted by Qt Linguist.

Verify Your Translation

The application does not use .ts files directly. The novelwriter/assets/i18n/nw_XX.qm files are the actual files used to translate the GUI into another language other than the default British English. These files are not generated by default, but they can be built with:

python3 pkgutils.py qtlrelease

You can now test the translation in novelWriter. The Preferences dialog should list the newly added language, so go ahead and select it.

Missing QtBase Translations

The default Qt dialogs also have translations, for instance for standard buttons like "Yes", "No", "Ok", "Cancel", etc. Generally, these translation files are installed with the Qt libraries on your system, and novelWriter will collect those translations from there. However, these translations are missing for many languages.

As a starting point, there is no need to translate any entries in the .ts files that are under elements starting with the letter "Q", like "QPlatformTheme", "QWizard", etc. If these turn up in English in novelWriter after activating a translation, it means they are probably missing in the Qt library, and you may also need to translate these.

These additional translation entries are generated from a file named i18n/qtbase.py, which is not a file that novelWriter uses. It is there only to generate these additional entries for the .ts files.

Project Localisation

Projects can have a different language setting than the GUI itself. The files with format project_XX.json in novelwriter/assets/i18n are simple translation maps for text that goes into the exported documents generated by the Build Novel Project tool.

The files are loaded based on the language setting in the Build Novel Project tool. At the present time, no other parts of the application use these files. Since these are used as replacement lookups, they are maintained as plain JSON files. The main usage is to generate chapter headers as number words.

Adding new translations for these files is easy. Just copy the project_en_GB.json file, rename it to the appropriate language coded filename, and open it in a text editor and edit the content.