Writer's Café 2 Translations

Contributing a translation

Then when you restart Writer's Café, that language should be available in the General Settings dialog; change to this language, and restart Writer's Café once more.

If you email me your translation, I can bundle it with the next version of Writer's Café.

Thank you in advance for your translations!

Resources and help files

• fiction.htb: Fiction: The Facts e-book in HTB format
• fiction.dat: scrambled version of the PDF Fiction: The Facts e-book
• writerscafe.htb: the Writer's Café Manual
• TechTips.htb: the Technical Tips
• WritingRecipes.htb: the Writing Recipes
• cookies.htb: the Cookies
• gettingstarted.pdf: the Getting Started guide
• writerscafe.bin: resources file in zip format, containing images and HTML files under the Resources folder name, including:
  • exercises.txt: general writing exercises
  • goals.txt: writing exercises goals file
  • obstacles.txt: writing exercises obstacles file
  • settings.txt: writing exercises settings file
  • about.htm: About text
  • register.htm: Registration dialog text
  • dictionary.htm: Dictionary import dialog text
  • malenames.txt: male forenames
  • femalenames.txt: female forenames
  • surnames.txt: surnames

If you wish to translate the HTB files, I can supply free registration for Anthemion HelpBlocks to do this and can send the Writer's Café manual sources on request.

More on working with .po files

When a new version of Writer's Café is released, you will probably find that some strings have been changed. Download the latest .po again, and merge it with your original .po file like this:

  msgmerge --quiet --no-fuzzy-matching writerscafe.po writerscafe2.08.po >
      writerscafe_new.po
  mv writerscafe_new.po writerscafe.po

Redundant translations (where the original string has been changed or removed) are commented out and added to the end of the file. Open the file in poEdit to find the untranslated strings.

If you wish to compile the .po into a .mo for testing purposes, you can use poEdit or you can run the command manually:

  msgfmt -o writerscafe.mo writerscafe.po

Windows binaries of the gettext tools, including msgmerge.exe and msgfmt.exe, are available here.

Other tips:

• It is not necessary to preserve the same menu command mnemonics as the original English mnemonics.
• Ask us if you have questions about the meaning of any of the strings.

More on working with help files

Here are some guidelines for translating these files:

• Please request the source files from us, and copy to a new location. When you have finished, please submit all files back to us.
• The structure must remain identical to the original in all translations. In particular, the name of the topic identifier (shown in the page properties dialog) should not be changed and it should be in the same relative position. Otherwise, the identifiers associated with each topic name will not be the same, and the wrong pages will be displayed when Help is pressed in the application.
• Use the _WC macro for referring to Writer's Café. You can redefine it if necessary, in the macro preferences page.
• The What's New? page does not need to be translated, though you can add a note at the start in the native language.

Table of languages and their canonical (directory) names

Back to the top