Translations

Owned by Stefan Prelle
Jul 14, 2023
2 min read

Translations

We develop Commlink bilingual in English as the default language and German as a second language (as all main developers/contributors are german right now). But basically all languages can be supported, if there are volunteers to provide such translations.

As Commlink is a Java programm, all translation entries are stored in property files. Such files basically look like this:

<translation-key>=<translated text>

A translation-key is something that is given by Commlink’s data. Several hundreds of this keys are already defined and the list gets longer with each publication.

The translated-text on the other hand is what you need to enter.

item.bone_lacing=Knochenverstärkung item.bone_lacing.desc=Dieser Text geht über mehr als eine Zeile.\ Ein Slash am Ende besagt, dass es in der nächsten Zeile weiter geht.

The file ending for this file is .properties. The filename contains a language code, like blabla_de.properties or blabla_fr.properties to indicate which translation is supported here.

Historically property files are encoding in ISO-8859-1 character encoding. If you want to express unicode characters, you need to encode them like this \u00A5 .
Since some time now, you can also use UTF-8 encoding directly.
Be aware: Not all tools support UTF-8 encoding property files yet and don’t mix encodings in the same file.

Locating property files

Unfortunately those files are not stored in a single place, but are distributed among several Git repositories and within among several directories.

  1. https://bitbucket.org/rpgframework-cloud/shadowrun-common/
    Contains the property files for code that we identified as “common for SR5 and SR6”

  2. https://bitbucket.org/rpgframework-cloud/shadowrun-6
    Contains the property files for everything related to Shadowrun 6

  3. https://bitbucket.org/rpgframework-cloud/rpgframework
    Contains the property files for generic code shared between different TTRPGs

  4. https://github.com/taranion/CommLink
    High level property files for the main application Commlink

In each of these Git repositories, look for .properties files in src/main/resources subfolders