Internationalise your apps using Qt
After putting so much effort into creating an application it would be shame to see it not being used just because it was only available in English. The bottom line is; most people pay more attention and give more respect to a product which is available in their own language.If you want a global audience for your software, it is very important that you localise your application for your users. Here’s how…
With the translated file, it’s time to compile it to produce a .qm file. This can be done by using the lrelease command:
$ lrelease feedback_fr.ts
You should have the feedback_fr.qm file in the project directory. Your application is now internationalised. Time to run and test it.
Compile the application:
$ qmake $ make
Run the application:
$ ./feedback
To see the French interface for the application, set the system locale to French. We can do this by the following command:
$ export LANG=fr
And finally, we can run the application:
$ ./feedback
Voila, our application now has a French interface.
Qt has excellent support for writing applications for an international audience and has become a vital GUI toolkit to reach global users. Sure, there are other toolkits, but in my book, nothing come close to the power and the ease of use of Qt…
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This is the right way to do it. However it is very very very daunting. Depending on size of application, if smaller, it may be viable to use other methods.
My personal favorite is to make translation function which recieves ID of a message, and return it in appropriate language. If I say that lang 1 will be english, 2 french and 3 portugese I make ID as:
LANGID * 100000 + MSGID
so message translate(1) will give back value, depending on laguage
100001 = “English”
200001 = “Français”
300001 = “Português”