Localization for MySQL Workbench

How to translate MySQL Workbench to your language.



Intro
-----

Workbench supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. There is backend
code that is written in C++ and is used in all platforms, frontend code that is native
to each platform and plugins/modules, some of which are platform neutral and some are native.

Internationalization (i18n) of the backend and cross platform code is simple, because all
messages are in source code and can be extracted, translated and then used with straightforward code.
I18n of the frontend/GUI is also easy if it's constructed from code, but not so much if the
UI is created in some sort of form designer (VisualStudio Form Designer in Windows, InterfaceBuilder
.xib files in Mac OS X and Glade/Gtkbuilder files in Linux). 

Currently only backend i18n is done. Windows GUI i18n will be added later and other platforms
if time allows.



How to Translate The Backend
----------------------------

Pre-Requisites:
To perform translation work you need to have gettext installed. If you don't have that
or have no idea what is it you can try asking the developers for the needed translatable files.


Translation fo the backend can be summarized in following steps:

1) Mark translatable strings with _() function/marker in source code. That is done by WB developers so
you should not worry about that.

2) Extract translatable strings into a .pot file. That can be done in Mac OS X or Linux by running
scan_po_files.sh file in the po subdir. The script will scan all backend files for translatable messages
and add them to a wbcore.pot file. If you want to translate WB from scratch you need to run this.

3) Rename wbcore.pot to a .po file for the ISO language code name, ex.: pt_BR.po, ja.po

4) Translate the po file for your language. See note below for more details about this.

5) If you're just updating a translation instead of doing it from scratch (or reusing the translation
from another language to get a headstart) you can just copy and rename the file you want. The
file may be missing messages that were added to WB since last time it was translated, so you may
need to update it. To do that, use the following command:

msgmerge -U <lang>.po wbcore.pot

That will merge the new messages from wbcore.pot and add them to the translated po file. 
Then you just need to translate the new entries.


Translating the PO file
-----------------------

- Any text editor can be used to edit the translatable po files, but there are tools that help you 
with translation and perform validations, such as poedit.

- Some strings may contain special sequences like %s %i etc. These are special markers used by
code indicating where some text will be inserted. If you find such text, it is CRITICAL that
the order and number of occurrences remain intact. You can change the text before and after them
as you want, but not the order and number of times they appear. For example:

msgid "Schema '%s' created."

Can be translated as:

msgstr "Esquema '%s' foi criado."

Or

"There are %i recordsets with unsaved changes in SQL tab %s.\n"

Can be translated as:

"%i resultados possuem modificacoes que nao foram salvas na aba SQL %s.\n"

But NOT as:

"A aba SQL %s possui %i resultados com modificacoes nao salvas.\n"

It's also important to keep special escapes such as \n or \t, they indicate newlines and tabs.