This was originally posted in the documentation mailinglist: Translating the OGo Application.

OK, first the bad news ... OGo currently only works out of the box with ISO-Latin-1/15 (except for the mailer). A result of code being written by a German company for the Germany market, sigh.

Now the good news: the OGo API uses Unicode almost everywhere, so there is high chance that the issue will be resolved quite quickly.

So that "issue" classifies translations into three, general categories:

a) 8-Bit, ISO-Latin-1/15
- French, German, English, Spanish, Portugese, .. ?

b) 8-Bit Encoding
- it *might* be easy to switch the standard 8-bit encoding of
   libFoundation from ISO-Latin-1 to something else (eg ISO-Latin-2)
- Czech, Russion, Korean, Turkish ?

c) Unicode
- to get Unicode working all over OGo we need
   - either to port OGo from libFoundation to gstep-base, which has
     full Unicode suport
   - or extend libFoundation to fully support Unicode
   - then we need to check all the code whether everything is working
- Japanese, Chinese

Now another bad thing, I can't really help on any of this (no time for that). We already got some people from the GNUstep project which are interested in porting OGo to gstep-base (AFAIK even a Chinese developer), so chances are very good that we are rapidly improving on b) and c) soon.

OK. All this doesn't need to stop people from starting to localize (ISO-Latin-1/15 guys in no case ;-). The most important thing to localize (and almost the only one except for very few images) are the so called ".strings" files.

Those files define a mapping from a key used in the HTML template to the actual label which is rendered. The strings files are located in

   WebUI/Resources

in the source tree which you can get as a .bz2 from the website. Inside the Resources directory you already find two language projects:

   English.lproj
and
   German.lproj

If you want to localize, just add one, eg:

   Spanish.lproj

After that you should simply copy all the strings file from the English.lproj:

   cp English.lproj/*.strings Spanish.lproj/

and you can start translation of each file ;-) They contain mappings like:
   Monday = "Monday"

eg for German you would change that to:
   Monday = "Montag"

So, that's it. If everything is translated, send me the new .lproj ;-)

To try out any changes, you may need to add your language to the "SkyLanguages" default. Eg:

   $ Defaults write OpenGroupware SkyLanguages \
       '(English,French,Spanish,German,Czech)'

Thanks a LOT for your help,
   Helge