I just switched my N900 to French language to test out the Gettext support for my MSCIM switcher applet. I was surprised to see how many popular apps seem to be lacking translations, or are only partially translated.

Using GNU Gettext it's actually really easy to localise your app. You mark the translateable strings like this:

print _('Some text to translate')

...in your code, then run the xgettext utility to create the dictionary template file (.pot), which you then email to translators.

You will need to link in the gettext library/module for your language of choice, for which simple instructions are a Google away.

Meanwhile your translators will simply translate your strings by editing the file by hand or with one of several multi-platform GUI tools, and then send you back the result. A single pass with the msgfmt command and you have the compiled catalog (.mo) file, which you place in /usr/share/locale/LL or LL_CC (LL = 2-digit ISO language abbreviation, CC = 2-digit ISO country code).

You could even just include a .po file with your app and solicit translations from anonymous users with no prior arrangement, although assigning translators is preferable.

Here's a list of examples of applications by translation status, based on what I have installed:

No translations:

• Ansel-A
• BatteryGraph
• Bless N900
• Classic Cam
• Conboy personal wiki
• Countdown Timer
• Cutetube
• kmPlayer
• Mappero
• Mobile Hotspot
• MyDicto
• PyGTKeditor
• QStarDict
• Quiver Image Viewer
• Rockbox
• Search Tool
• Someplayer
• SunVox
• Symfonie

Partial translations:

• Countdown Home - .mo files are supplied for many languages but were not used on my N900. Some text can be changed by editing the .ini file. *
• GPE Todo - again, .mo files supplied but perhaps not used? *
• MSCIMswitcherstatus (only French and Chinese Simplified translations so far) **

* This may be due to porting from an earlier version of Maemo.
** This is my app, and I only added Gettext support yesterday, which took all of 2 hours.

Good translations:

• Abiword
• FBReader
• Grsync
• miniGnumeric
• MStarDict (could use more languages)
• Sleepanalyser
• SMplayer
• StrokeOrder

Is there any way to do it yourself?

Well, just to let you know, I am the author of SleepAnalyser and some other applications. As you can see, SleepAnalyser supports other languages, but has currently just a few languages included.
And as you might guess, I do not speak 20 languages, so most of the languages would have to be distributed by other people. Up to now only 3 people volunteered to supply a translation in their language, even it is very easy and might take you 15..30 minutes.
This means, until more people are willing to invest their time and knowledge, it will stay with those few translations!

P.S. of course I could use Google translation for this, but I am very sure you wouldn't want to use a translation like that

i dropped by to see what i can do to help but i didn't get anything from your exchange. hehe i'm a super noob but i can speak English and Filipino. i saw Xagoln's post over at the "N900 Owners from the Philippines" thread.

note: if you find my random use of capitalization irritating, just say so. i like ee cummings so i tend to type in small caps. hehe

Count me in (saw Xagoln's message in the Philippines thread too). Then again I also mentioned there that for the Philippines, most Filipinos use English nowadays. They speak Filipino generally, but as far as reading, it's mostly English. It has something to do with foreign/non-Filipino words being "assimilated" into our language so there are a lot of words in the Filipino vocabulary which don't really have a "Filipino/Tagalog" translation.

Thanks for joining the thread, guys. It looks like we are waiting on a bit more developer "buy-in" at the moment. I think a lot of Devs are busy adding features and squashing bugs, and don't consider translating their apps as being a priority right now.

It may be that many of them do not realise how easy it is to make apps translateable.

i have seen many devs on here asking for translations, but not seeming to receive many. i only speak english so i can neither help nor am i worried about lack of translations. but i can only suggest if you do speak many languages, contact the dev of your favourite untranslated apps, drop them an email with the translations and let them know how easy it is to include in their app. you mahy be pleasantly surprised how many would love to see their app adopted by more foreign language speakers but just havent had the opportunity.

Most recent applications will be written using Qt, which has it's own translation features. cuteTube-QML currently has translations for Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Russian (helpfully provided by TMO users). I was under the impression that SomePlayer also has translations.

For Qt applications, any user can provide a translation quite easily using Qt Linguist, which is a translation tool with a nice GUI.

thing is, unless the program is open source and developed by various programmers from various countries, most developers (mostly if it's a one man project) don't find the necessity of translating/providing translations to their apps. even though Qt (and maybe others as well) have provide a very easy way to provide a translation (just wrap all strings to "tr" function in Qt), still I find many Qt apps lack of aforementioned translation support

I'm a developer myself, and also a user of hundreds/thousands/millions(?) of apps, and while English is not my first language, I've never bother to provide translation support for my apps, or using non-English (even if my native language translation is supported) for any apps

but still, I appreciate your effort on this matter, and would gladly help if you need one

I thought tr was for trimming :-) . Seems like need to learn more about qt linguistics as well.