1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
|
/****************************************************************************
**
** Copyright (C) 2010 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
** All rights reserved.
** Contact: Nokia Corporation (qt-info@nokia.com)
**
** This file is part of the documentation of the Qt Toolkit.
**
** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:FDL$
** No Commercial Usage
** This file contains pre-release code and may not be distributed.
** You may use this file in accordance with the terms and conditions
** contained in the Technology Preview License Agreement accompanying
** this package.
**
** GNU Free Documentation License
** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Free
** Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software
** Foundation and appearing in the file included in the packaging of this
** file.
**
** If you have questions regarding the use of this file, please contact
** Nokia at qt-info@nokia.com.
** $QT_END_LICENSE$
**
****************************************************************************/
/*!
\group i18n
\title Qt Classes for Internationalization
See \l{Internationalization with Qt} for information on how to use these classes
in your applications.
*/
/*!
\page internationalization.html
\title Internationalization with Qt
\brief Information about Qt's support for internationalization and multiple languages.
\nextpage Writing Source Code for Translation
\ingroup qt-basic-concepts
\keyword internationalization
\keyword i18n
The internationalization of an application is the process of making
the application usable by people in countries other than one's own.
\tableofcontents
\section1 Relevant Qt Classes and APIs
These classes support internationalizing of Qt applications.
\annotatedlist i18n
\section1 Languages and Writing Systems
In some cases internationalization is simple, for example, making a US
application accessible to Australian or British users may require
little more than a few spelling corrections. But to make a US
application usable by Japanese users, or a Korean application usable
by German users, will require that the software operate not only in
different languages, but use different input techniques, character
encodings and presentation conventions.
Qt tries to make internationalization as painless as possible for
developers. All input widgets and text drawing methods in Qt offer
built-in support for all supported languages. The built-in font engine
is capable of correctly and attractively rendering text that contains
characters from a variety of different writing systems at the same
time.
Qt supports most languages in use today, in particular:
\list
\o All East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean)
\o All Western languages (using Latin script)
\o Arabic
\o Cyrillic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, etc.)
\o Greek
\o Hebrew
\o Thai and Lao
\o All scripts in Unicode 5.1 that do not require special processing
\endlist
On Windows, Unix/X11 with FontConfig (client side font support)
and Qt for Embedded Linux the following languages are also supported:
\list
\o Bengali
\o Devanagari
\o Dhivehi (Thaana)
\o Gujarati
\o Gurmukhi
\o Kannada
\o Khmer
\o Malayalam
\o Myanmar
\o Syriac
\o Tamil
\o Telugu
\o Tibetan
\o N'Ko
\endlist
Many of these writing systems exhibit special features:
\list
\o \bold{Special line breaking behavior.} Some of the Asian languages are
written without spaces between words. Line breaking can occur either
after every character (with exceptions) as in Chinese, Japanese and
Korean, or after logical word boundaries as in Thai.
\o \bold{Bidirectional writing.} Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to
left, except for numbers and embedded English text which is written
left to right. The exact behavior is defined in the
\l{http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/}{Unicode Technical Annex #9}.
\o \bold{Non-spacing or diacritical marks (accents or umlauts in European
languages).} Some languages such as Vietnamese make extensive use of
these marks and some characters can have more than one mark at the
same time to clarify pronunciation.
\o \bold{Ligatures.} In special contexts, some pairs of characters get
replaced by a combined glyph forming a ligature. Common examples are
the fl and fi ligatures used in typesetting US and European books.
\endlist
Qt tries to take care of all the special features listed above. You
usually don't have to worry about these features so long as you use
Qt's input widgets (e.g. QLineEdit, QTextEdit, and derived classes)
and Qt's display widgets (e.g. QLabel).
Support for these writing systems is transparent to the
programmer and completely encapsulated in \l{rich text
processing}{Qt's text engine}. This means that you don't need to
have any knowledge about the writing system used in a particular
language, except for the following small points:
\list
\o QPainter::drawText(int x, int y, const QString &str) will always
draw the string with its left edge at the position specified with
the x, y parameters. This will usually give you left aligned strings.
Arabic and Hebrew application strings are usually right
aligned, so for these languages use the version of drawText() that
takes a QRect since this will align in accordance with the language.
\o When you write your own text input controls, use QTextLayout.
In some languages (e.g. Arabic or languages from the Indian
subcontinent), the width and shape of a glyph changes depending on the
surrounding characters, which QTextLayout takes into account.
Writing input controls usually requires a certain knowledge of the
scripts it is going to be used in. Usually the easiest way is to
subclass QLineEdit or QTextEdit.
\endlist
The following sections give some information on the status of the
internationalization (i18n) support in Qt. See also the \l{Qt
Linguist manual}.
\section1 Step by Step
Writing cross-platform international software with Qt is a gentle,
incremental process. Your software can become internationalized in
the following stages:
\section2 Use QString for All User-Visible Text
Since QString uses the Unicode 5.1 encoding internally, every
language in the world can be processed transparently using
familiar text processing operations. Also, since all Qt functions
that present text to the user take a QString as a parameter,
there is no \c{char *} to QString conversion overhead.
Strings that are in "programmer space" (such as QObject names
and file format texts) need not use QString; the traditional
\c{char *} or the QByteArray class will suffice.
You're unlikely to notice that you are using Unicode;
QString, and QChar are just like easier versions of the crude
\c{const char *} and char from traditional C.
\section2 Use tr() for All Literal Text
Wherever your program uses "quoted text" for text that will
be presented to the user, ensure that it is processed by the \l
QCoreApplication::translate() function. Essentially all that is necessary
to achieve this is to use QObject::tr(). For example, assuming the
\c LoginWidget is a subclass of QWidget:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 0
This accounts for 99% of the user-visible strings you're likely to
write.
If the quoted text is not in a member function of a
QObject subclass, use either the tr() function of an
appropriate class, or the QCoreApplication::translate() function
directly:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 1
If you need to have translatable text completely
outside a function, there are two macros to help: QT_TR_NOOP()
and QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP(). They merely mark the text for
extraction by the \c lupdate utility described below.
The macros expand to just the text (without the context).
Example of QT_TR_NOOP():
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 2
Example of QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP():
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 3
If you disable the \c{const char *} to QString automatic
conversion by compiling your software with the macro \c
QT_NO_CAST_FROM_ASCII defined, you'll be very likely to catch any
strings you are missing. See QString::fromLatin1() for more
information. Disabling the conversion can make programming a bit
cumbersome.
If your source language uses characters outside Latin1, you
might find QObject::trUtf8() more convenient than
QObject::tr(), as tr() depends on the
QTextCodec::codecForTr(), which makes it more fragile than
QObject::trUtf8().
\section2 Use QKeySequence() for Accelerator Values
Accelerator values such as Ctrl+Q or Alt+F need to be translated
too. If you hardcode Qt::CTRL + Qt::Key_Q for "quit" in your
application, translators won't be able to override it. The
correct idiom is
\snippet examples/mainwindows/application/mainwindow.cpp 20
\section2 Use QString::arg() for Dynamic Text
The QString::arg() functions offer a simple means for substituting
arguments:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 4
In some languages the order of arguments may need to change, and this
can easily be achieved by changing the order of the % arguments. For
example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 5
produces the correct output in English and Norwegian:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 6
\section2 Produce Translations
Once you are using tr() throughout an application, you can start
producing translations of the user-visible text in your program.
The \l{Qt Linguist manual} provides further information about
Qt's translation tools, \e{Qt Linguist}, \c lupdate and \c
lrelease.
Translation of a Qt application is a three-step process:
\list 1
\o Run \c lupdate to extract translatable text from the C++
source code of the Qt application, resulting in a message file
for translators (a TS file). The utility recognizes the tr()
construct and the \c{QT_TR*_NOOP()} macros described above and
produces TS files (usually one per language).
\o Provide translations for the source texts in the TS file, using
\e{Qt Linguist}. Since TS files are in XML format, you can also
edit them by hand.
\o Run \c lrelease to obtain a light-weight message file (a QM
file) from the TS file, suitable only for end use. Think of the TS
files as "source files", and QM files as "object files". The
translator edits the TS files, but the users of your application
only need the QM files. Both kinds of files are platform and
locale independent.
\endlist
Typically, you will repeat these steps for every release of your
application. The \c lupdate utility does its best to reuse the
translations from previous releases.
Before you run \c lupdate, you should prepare a project file. Here's
an example project file (\c .pro file):
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 7
When you run \c lupdate or \c lrelease, you must give the name of the
project file as a command-line argument.
In this example, four exotic languages are supported: Danish,
Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish. If you use \l{qmake}, you usually
don't need an extra project file for \c lupdate; your \c qmake
project file will work fine once you add the \c TRANSLATIONS
entry.
In your application, you must \l QTranslator::load() the translation
files appropriate for the user's language, and install them using \l
QCoreApplication::installTranslator().
\c linguist, \c lupdate and \c lrelease are installed in the \c bin
subdirectory of the base directory Qt is installed into. Click Help|Manual
in \e{Qt Linguist} to access the user's manual; it contains a tutorial
to get you started.
\target qt-itself
Qt itself contains over 400 strings that will also need to be
translated into the languages that you are targeting. You will find
translation files for French, German and Simplified Chinese in
\c{$QTDIR/translations}, as well as a template for translating to
other languages. (This directory also contains some additional
unsupported translations which may be useful.)
Typically, your application's \c main() function will look like
this:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 8
Note the use of QLibraryInfo::location() to locate the Qt translations.
Developers should request the path to the translations at run-time by
passing QLibraryInfo::TranslationsPath to this function instead of
using the \c QTDIR environment variable in their applications.
\section2 Support for Encodings
The QTextCodec class and the facilities in QTextStream make it easy to
support many input and output encodings for your users' data. When an
application starts, the locale of the machine will determine the 8-bit
encoding used when dealing with 8-bit data: such as for font
selection, text display, 8-bit text I/O, and character input.
The application may occasionally require encodings other than the
default local 8-bit encoding. For example, an application in a
Cyrillic KOI8-R locale (the de-facto standard locale in Russia) might
need to output Cyrillic in the ISO 8859-5 encoding. Code for this
would be:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 9
For converting Unicode to local 8-bit encodings, a shortcut is
available: the QString::toLocal8Bit() function returns such 8-bit
data. Another useful shortcut is QString::toUtf8(), which returns
text in the 8-bit UTF-8 encoding: this perfectly preserves
Unicode information while looking like plain ASCII if the text is
wholly ASCII.
For converting the other way, there are the QString::fromUtf8() and
QString::fromLocal8Bit() convenience functions, or the general code,
demonstrated by this conversion from ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic to Unicode
conversion:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 10
Ideally Unicode I/O should be used as this maximizes the portability
of documents between users around the world, but in reality it is
useful to support all the appropriate encodings that your users will
need to process existing documents. In general, Unicode (UTF-16 or
UTF-8) is best for information transferred between arbitrary people,
while within a language or national group, a local standard is often
more appropriate. The most important encoding to support is the one
returned by QTextCodec::codecForLocale(), as this is the one the user
is most likely to need for communicating with other people and
applications (this is the codec used by local8Bit()).
Qt supports most of the more frequently used encodings natively. For a
complete list of supported encodings see the \l QTextCodec
documentation.
In some cases and for less frequently used encodings it may be
necessary to write your own QTextCodec subclass. Depending on the
urgency, it may be useful to contact Qt's technical support team or
ask on the \c qt-interest mailing list to see if someone else is
already working on supporting the encoding.
\keyword localization
\section2 Localize
Localization is the process of adapting to local conventions, for
example presenting dates and times using the locally preferred
formats. Such localizations can be accomplished using appropriate tr()
strings.
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 11
In the example, for the US we would leave the translation of
"AMPM" as it is and thereby use the 12-hour clock branch; but in
Europe we would translate it as something else and this will make
the code use the 24-hour clock branch.
For localized numbers use the QLocale class.
Localizing images is not recommended. Choose clear icons that are
appropriate for all localities, rather than relying on local puns or
stretched metaphors. The exception is for images of left and right
pointing arrows which may need to be reversed for Arabic and Hebrew
locales.
\section1 Dynamic Translation
Some applications, such as Qt Linguist, must be able to support changes
to the user's language settings while they are still running. To make
widgets aware of changes to the installed QTranslators, reimplement the
widget's \l{QWidget::changeEvent()}{changeEvent()} function to check whether
the event is a \l{QEvent::LanguageChange}{LanguageChange} event, and update
the text displayed by widgets using the \l{QObject::tr()}{tr()} function
in the usual way. For example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 12
All other change events should be passed on by calling the default
implementation of the function.
The list of installed translators might change in reaction to a
\l{QEvent::LocaleChange}{LocaleChange} event, or the application might
provide a user interface that allows the user to change the current
application language.
The default event handler for QWidget subclasses responds to the
QEvent::LanguageChange event, and will call this function when necessary.
\l{QEvent::LanguageChange}{LanguageChange} events are posted when a new
translation is installed using the QCoreApplication::installTranslator()
function. Additionally, other application components can also force
widgets to update themselves by posting LanguageChange events to them.
\section1 Translating Non-Qt Classes
It is sometimes necessary to provide internationalization support for
strings used in classes that do not inherit QObject or use the Q_OBJECT
macro to enable translation features. Since Qt translates strings at
run-time based on the class they are associated with and \c lupdate
looks for translatable strings in the source code, non-Qt classes must
use mechanisms that also provide this information.
One way to do this is to add translation support to a non-Qt class
using the Q_DECLARE_TR_FUNCTIONS() macro; for example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/i18n-non-qt-class/myclass.h 0
\dots
\snippet doc/src/snippets/i18n-non-qt-class/myclass.h 1
This provides the class with \l{QObject::}{tr()} functions that can
be used to translate strings associated with the class, and makes it
possible for \c lupdate to find translatable strings in the source
code.
Alternatively, the QCoreApplication::translate() function can be called
with a specific context, and this will be recognized by \c lupdate and
Qt Linguist.
\section1 System Support
Some of the operating systems and windowing systems that Qt runs on
only have limited support for Unicode. The level of support available
in the underlying system has some influence on the support that Qt can
provide on those platforms, although in general Qt applications need
not be too concerned with platform-specific limitations.
\section2 Unix/X11
\list
\o Locale-oriented fonts and input methods. Qt hides these and
provides Unicode input and output.
\o Filesystem conventions such as
\l{http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2279.txt}{UTF-8}
are under development in some Unix variants. All Qt file
functions allow Unicode, but convert filenames to the local
8-bit encoding, as this is the Unix convention (see
QFile::setEncodingFunction() to explore alternative
encodings).
\o File I/O defaults to the local 8-bit encoding,
with Unicode options in QTextStream.
\o Many Unix distributions contain only partial support for some locales.
For example, if you have a \c /usr/share/locale/ja_JP.EUC directory,
this does not necessarily mean you can display Japanese text; you also
need JIS encoded fonts (or Unicode fonts), and the
\c /usr/share/locale/ja_JP.EUC directory needs to be complete. For
best results, use complete locales from your system vendor.
\endlist
\section2 Windows
\list
\o Qt provides full Unicode support, including input methods, fonts,
clipboard, drag-and-drop and file names.
\o File I/O defaults to Latin1, with Unicode options in QTextStream.
Note that some Windows programs do not understand big-endian
Unicode text files even though that is the order prescribed by
the Unicode Standard in the absence of higher-level protocols.
\endlist
\section2 Mac OS X
For details on Mac-specific translation, refer to the Qt/Mac Specific Issues
document \l{Qt for Mac OS X - Specific Issues#Translating the Application Menu and Native Dialogs}{here}.
*/
/*!
\page i18n-source-translation.html
\title Writing Source Code for Translation
\ingroup i18n
\previouspage Internationalization with Qt
\contentspage Internationalization with Qt
\nextpage Translation Rules for Plurals
\brief How to write source code in a way that makes it possible for user-visible text to be translated.
\tableofcontents
\section1 The Basics
Developers use the \l{QObject::}{tr()} function to obtain translated text
for their classes, typically for display purposes. This function is also
used to indicate which text strings in an application are translatable.
Qt indexes each translatable string by the \e{translation context} it is
associated with; this is generally the name of the QObject subclass it is
used in.
Translation contexts are defined for new QObject-based classes by the use
of the Q_OBJECT macro in each new class definition.
When tr() is called, it looks up the translatable string using a QTranslator
object. For translation to work, one or more of these must have been
installed on the application object in the way described in the
\l{#Enabling Translation}{Enabling Translation} section below.
\section1 Defining a Translation Context
The translation context for QObject and each QObject subclass is the
class name itself. Developers subclassing QObject must use the
Q_OBJECT macro in their class definition to override the translation
context. This macro sets the context to the name of the subclass.
For example, the following class definition includes the Q_OBJECT macro,
implementing a new tr() that uses the \c MainWindow context:
\snippet mainwindows/sdi/mainwindow.h class definition with macro
\dots
If Q_OBJECT is not used in a class definition, the context will be
inherited from the base class. For example, since all QObject-based
classes in Qt provide a context, a new QWidget subclass defined without
a Q_OBJECT macro will use the \c QWidget context if its tr() function
is invoked.
\section1 Using tr() to Obtain a Translation
The following example shows how a translation is obtained for the
class shown in the previous section:
\snippet mainwindows/sdi/mainwindow.cpp implicit tr context
\dots
Here, the translation context is \c MainWindow because it is the
\c MainWindow::tr() function that is invoked. The text returned
by the tr() function is a translation of "&File" obtained from
the \c MainWindow context.
When Qt's translation tool, \l lupdate, is used to process a set of source
files, the text wrapped in tr() calls is stored in a section of the translation
file that corresponds to its translation context.
In some situations, it is useful to give a translation context explicitly
by fully qualifying the call to tr(); for example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp explicit tr context
This call obtains the translated text for "Page up" from the \c QScrollBar
context. Developers can also use the QCoreApplication::translate() function
to obtain a translation for a particular translation context.
\section1 Translator Comments
Developers can include information about each translatable string to
help translators with the translation process. These are extracted
when \l lupdate is used to process the source files. The recommended
way to add comments is to annotate the tr() calls in your code with
comments of the form:
\tt{//: ...}
or
\tt{\begincomment: ... \endcomment}
Examples:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp 40
In these examples, the comments will be associated with the strings
passed to tr() in the context of each call.
\section1 Adding Meta-Data to Strings
Additional data can be attached to each translatable message. These are
extracted when \l lupdate is used to process the source files. The
recommended way to add meta-data is to annotate the tr() calls in your code
with comments of the form:
\tt{//= <id>}
This can be used to give the message a unique identifier to support tools
which need it.
An alternative way to attach meta-data is to use the following syntax:
\tt{//~ <field name> <field contents>}
This can be used to attach meta-data to the message. The field name should
consist of a domain prefix (possibly the conventional file extension of the
file format the field is inspired by), a hyphen and the actual field name
in underscore-delimited notation. For storage in TS files, the field name
together with the prefix "extra-" will form an XML element name. The field
contents will be XML-escaped, but otherwise appear verbatim as the
element's contents. Any number of unique fields can be added to each
message.
Example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp meta data
Meta-data appearing right in front of a magic TRANSLATOR comment applies to
the whole TS file.
\section1 Disambiguation
If the same translatable string is used in different roles within the same
translation context, an additional identifying string may be passed in
the call to \l{QObject::}{tr()}. This optional disambiguation argument
is used to distinguish between otherwise identical strings.
Example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp 17
\dots
In Qt 4.4 and earlier, this disambiguation parameter was the preferred
way to specify comments to translators.
\section1 Character Encodings
You can set the encoding for the source text by calling QTextCodec::setCodecForTr().
By default, the source text is assumed to be in Latin-1 encoding.
\section1 Handling Plurals
Some translatable strings contain placeholders for integer values and need
to be translated differently depending on the values in use.
To help with this problem, developers pass an additional integer argument
to the \l{QObject::}{tr()} function, and typically use a special notation
for plurals in each translatable string.
If this argument is equal or greater than zero, all occurrences of
\c %n in the resulting string are replaced with a decimal representation
of the value supplied. In addition, the translation used will adapt to the
value according to the rules for each language.
Example:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp 18
The table below shows what string is returned depending on the
active translation:
\table
\header \o \o{3,1} Active Translation
\header \o \a n \o No Translation \o French \o English
\row \o 0 \o "0 message(s) saved" \o "0 message sauvegard\unicode{0xE9}" \o "0 message\bold{s} saved"
\row \o 1 \o "1 message(s) saved" \o "1 message sauvegard\unicode{0xE9}" \o "1 message saved"
\row \o 2 \o "2 message(s) saved" \o "2 message\bold{s} sauvegard\unicode{0xE9}\bold{s}" \o "2 message\bold{s} saved"
\row \o 37 \o "37 message(s) saved" \o "37 message\bold{s} sauvegard\unicode{0xE9}\bold{s}" \o "37 message\bold{s} saved"
\endtable
This idiom is more flexible than the traditional approach; e.g.,
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/src_corelib_kernel_qobject.cpp 19
because it also works with target languages that have several
plural forms (e.g., Irish has a special "dual" form that should
be used when \c n is 2), and it handles the \e n == 0 case
correctly for languages such as French that require the singular.
See the \l{Qt Linguist Manual} for details.
Instead of \c %n, you can use \c %Ln to produce a localized
representation of \a n. The conversion uses the default locale,
set using QLocale::setDefault(). (If no default locale was
specified, the "C" locale is used.)
A summary of the rules used to translate strings containing plurals can be
found in the \l{Translation Rules for Plurals} document.
\section1 Enabling Translation
Typically, your application's \c main() function will look like
this:
\snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_i18n.qdoc 8
Note the use of QLibraryInfo::location() to locate the Qt translations.
Developers should request the path to the translations at run-time by
passing QLibraryInfo::TranslationsPath to this function instead of
using the \c QTDIR environment variable in their applications.
\section1 Further Reading
\l{Qt Linguist Manual}, \l{Hello tr() Example}, \l{Translation Rules for Plurals}
*/
/*!
\page i18n-plural-rules.html
\title Translation Rules for Plurals
\ingroup i18n
\previouspage Writing Source Code for Translation
\contentspage Internationalization with Qt
\brief A summary of the translation rules for plurals produced by Qt's i18n tools.
The table below shows the specific rules that are produced by Qt Linguist
and \c lrelease for a selection of languages. Cells marked \e otherwise
indicate the form used when none of the other rules are appropriate for a
specific language.
\table 80%
\header \o Language \o Rule 1 \o Rule 2 \o Rule 3
\row \o English \o \c{n == 1}
\o \e{otherwise} \o N/A
\row \o French \o \c{n < 2}
\o \e{otherwise} \o N/A
\row \o Czech \o \c{n % 100 == 1}
\o \c{n % 100 >= 2 && n % 100 <= 4}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Irish \o \c{n == 1}
\o \c{n == 2} \o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Latvian \o \c{n % 10 == 1&& n % 100 != 11}
\o \c{n != 0} \o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Lithuanian \o \c{n % 10 == 1&& n % 100 != 11}
\o \c{n % 100 != 12 && n % 10 == 2}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Macedonian \o \c{n % 10 == 1}
\o \c{n % 10 == 2} \o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Polish \o \c{n == 1}
\o \c{n % 10 >= 2 && n % 10 <= 4
&& (n % 100 < 10 || n % 100 > 20)}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Romanian \o \c{n == 1}
\o \c{n == 0|| (n % 100 >= 1 && n % 100 <= 20)}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Russian \o \c{n % 10 == 1&& n % 100 != 11}
\o \c{n % 10 >= 2 && n % 10 <= 4
&& (n % 100 < 10 || n % 100 > 20)}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Slovak \o \c{n == 1} \o \c{n >= 2 && n <= 4}
\o \e{otherwise}
\row \o Japanese \o \e{otherwise} \o N/A \o N/A
\endtable
The rules themselves are not documented and are internal to Qt Linguist and \c lrelease.
*/
|