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A week ago I saw a friend running XFCE on his eeePC. To my surprise the only string in English I was able to see in the screen was the most obvious, the Applications menu button. The rest of the menu was translated in Finnish. To me it sounded weird that the most visible text of the whole XFCE would just slip through the translation process so I decided to ask around and this is what I found.
For the start of the discussion, see Og Maciel’s blog
Me: You would be the right person to ask: The application button of XFCE. At least in Xubuntu Hardy it hasn’t been possible to translate. The rest of the menu has been translated well but the button itself fails.
So would you please check if there has been fixes to make it translateable and if not, do the magic to fix this.
Timo Jyrinki: The single string in question is the text “Applications” itself, which for some reason isn’t available for translation in Launchpad and can only be changed manually in the properties dialog by the user. All the actual menu items are (more or less) translated, but the most visible string on the XFCE desktop itself seems not.
It seems the hard-coded menu.xml strings in xfdesktop4 don’t include “Applications” string either (there’s menu.xml.fi with the translations that are available via that).
Cody A. W. Somerville: Ah! That string is in xubuntu-default-settings – specifically, etc/xdg/xfce4/panel/xfce4-menu-1.rc
Og Maciel: I checked LP for a xubuntu-default-settings projects and noticed that it is not set up for translations (https://launchpad.net/xubuntu-default-settings). Is this something that you guys are planning to do in the near future?
Cody A. W. Somerville: It is certainly something we should probably target for Jaunty. We just don’t have anyone on our team that is an expert with translations.
I suppose the right address to go would be https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xubuntu-default-settings to find the package in question.
If you know what needs to be done (a gettext support in xubuntu-default-settings?) to fix this and you can do it please do! Help the Xubuntu community that likes to have the desktop on their native language. Thank you!
edit: as the first comment points out, there’s a bug reported in Launchpad about this with status ‘triaged’.
edit2: If you’re a software developer – make sure your program supports localisation! It’s a pain to fix afterwards, as you see here..
No related posts.
One year ago, I submit a bugreport about this issue:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xubuntu-default-settings/+bug/163206
Its status is “Triaged” :(
Cheers,
Ricardo.
Well, my option was bold: remove the “applications” name in the button.
Not the better answer for most of the people, but I also don’t like the name of the buttons on the buttons.
@Ricardo: thanks, added the link in the post
@Alberto: that would do it as well – but it still needs some hacking around..