[SOLVED] Using existing translations from another domain

[Amy C <mathematical coffee gmail com>]

Hi all,

I asked this question a while ago (maybe a week or so?), although I've
been trying to work this out for a couple of months. Well, I just
worked out how to do it so I thought I'd share in case anyone else
wants to know.

I've got an extension that provides a window menu from the appMenu
almost identical to the one you get by right-clicking a window's
system title bar: with 'Minimize', 'Maximize', 'Move', ...

Now I wanted to add translations, but since the strings in my menu are
identical to those in the system right-click menu, I felt that rather
than starting from scratch and having to rely on the good will of
translators to re-translate all the strings for me, I should just use
the translations from the "system".

After a lot of searching I realised that that right-click menu is
handled by either Metacity or Mutter, being the window manager. So I
looked in the Mutter source (in the 'po') directory at en_GB.po
(translation file), and noticed a whole bunch of strings to be
translated:

Ma_ximize
Mi_nimize
_Resize
_Move

and so on. Exactly what I want (the _ are for keyboard accelerators).

Once I discovered this, it's simply a matter of adding the following
lines (well in 3.2 anyhow, I imagine it's much the same in 3.4):

const Gettext = imports.gettext.domain('mutter'); // I want to use the
mutter translations
const _ = Gettext.gettext;

log(_("Mi_nimize")); // Voila! It translates!!

So after ages of wondering how to do this, it boils down to really
just finding the right domain to use with gettext (which was a bit of
educated guessing - first that the system window menu would be handled
by the window manager, and then downloading the source to look at the
po files).

(I did also take the additional step of removing the underscores since
they appear as literal underscores if used in a PopupMenuItem. If a
language legitimately uses underscores as characters then the
translated string will be missing them, but hopefully there aren't too
many of those.

Also, I'm tossing up whether to keep using the mutter translations or
to create my own translations (just copying the relevant lines from
the mutter .po files) which allows me to at least add the possibility
of extra translated strings that are not in the mutter source, like
'Raise window', or 'Window options'.)


Also, to test a translation quickly you can go in the terminal and do:

export LANG=it_IT.utf8 # for example italian
gjs # start gjs console
const Gettext = imports.gettext.domain('mutter'); // use mutter translations
// if you are using your own domain not in the system locale directory,
// you probably need some sort of
bindtextdomain('mydomain','/path/to/locale/dir')
const _ = Gettext.gettext;
_("Maximize Window")
// "Massimizza la finestra"

(I just do it in the console to keep the language changes to that one
terminal session instead of affecting my global session).

Hope this helps someone some time in the future!