The app offers internationalization support using PO (gettext) files.

It's a popular format among translation professionals, and it has native support in Godot.

We keep the translation files in a separate repository. To contribute translations, please head to the learn-gdscript-translations repository, where you'll find detailed instructions.

This folder contains the app's included translations (those that are complete or nearly complete) and scripts to manage them.

The engine automatically translates UI nodes, while we need to wrap string literals in calls to the tr() function.

In your typical Godot project, you would preload translation resources through the project settings.

Instead, this app loads translations dynamically because we separate localization resources into several files per supported language. This applies to both POT files (translation templates) and translated PO files.

The gettext translation format comes with two file extensions: POT for translation templates and PO for translations to a specific language. PO files derive from POT files, which allow us to track strings that changed between releases finely.

You generate the template POT files using a Python script included in this folder: extract.py.

To use the script, first create and activate a Python virtual environment. This allows you to install Python libraries this project needs without affecting your whole computer's Python installation.

Activate the environment and install dependencies with these commands (on Unix-like systems):

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

After doing that once, you can directly activate the environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

Then, run the extraction script:

python i18n/extract.py

You need to run it from the project's root directory. You then need to copy the POT files over to the learn-gdscript-translations repository where we translate the content.

To add a new language to the app, you need to:

1. Create a new subdirectory in the learn-gdscript-translations repository with the two-letter code of your language. For example, es/ for Spanish, ru/ for Russian, or zh/ for Chinese.
2. For each POT file in the repository's root folder, create a derived PO translation file in your new subdirectory. You can use the program Poedit to do so.
3. In this repository, open the TranslationManager.gd script and add your new language code to its SUPPORTED_LOCALES constant. The order of languages in SUPPORTED_LOCALES defines the order they'll appear in the settings menu.

The app may not support your language's characters. If that is the case, please open an issue on the repository to add the missing font files and font switching code.

Important: Currently, right-to-left languages like Arabic are not supported. The app needs to be ported to Godot 4 first, which will make it easier to add support for right-to-left languages.