I’m trying to switch my desktop permanently from English to German. In 11.4 I could do this with absolutely no problems through Yast.
In 12.1 I did the same thing and ended up with an annoying incomplete mix – 75% of my computer is in German and the other 25% in English. As an example, the different “tabs” of the KDE menu (Favorites, Applications, Computer, History, Shutdown) are translated, but most of the application entries themselves are not. (LibreOffice is pretty humorously categorized under “Anwendungen” → “Office” rather than “Anwendungen” → “Büro”.)
Most applications (all KDE apps, LibreOffice, Wine) are translated completely themselves, but a few others such as Firefox and (interestingly) the Yast menu are not translated at all. Perhaps there is some setting that I am still missing?
Do yo have all the language packages for German belonging to those applications installed?
YaST> Software > Software management and then the use the View menu to choose the Languages view.
Thanks. I knew I was missing something! That fixed most of the still untranslated applications as far as I can tell.
What about my KDE menu as I mentioned? Items having to do with location (home folder, network) are translated but those relating to actual programs (“Web Browser” - firefox, “Audio Player” - amarok) are still not. Under 11.4 I seem to recall those menu items being translated and re-ordered.
My idea is that when you switch KDE to another language, it actively seraches for the translations it has to use in the application items in it’s menu.
Also when you install an application, that is a trigger for adding something to the menu (in the correct language when possible).
But when you change the language and the proper translation can not be found (as you did earlier) either nothing is changed or it falls back to a default language (which I assume to come out as english in your case).
When you then install a language package, I guess that is not a trigger at all.
Thus IMHO you should change KDE back to english and then again to german to reinstate things to be done in the cortrect sequence.
Just a suggestion.
On 2012-03-13 10:16, hcvv wrote:
>
> My idea is that when you switch KDE to another language, it actively
> seraches for the translations it has to use in the application items in
> it’s menu.
As a translator myself, I’m interested. I think the menus are translated
(when they are) in a branch named “packages” or perhaps in the
“update-desktop-files-*.po” files. My personal though on these, when I
tried once, is that they are thousands of strings that you translate once
and next year you have to translate again from scratch almost, so it is
disappointing and in the end translators abandon that task.
I don’t know if that is the case for German, but it is for Spanish, AFAIK.
For the “layman” I’ll say that translation is done by volunteers and it is
a somwehat boring task. Even devs forget the task, tools to do this are
incomplete, and some devs do not help when they create confusing strings
without context comments for translators.
> Thus IMHO you should change KDE back to english and then again to
> german to reinstate things to be done in the cortrect sequence.
> Just a suggestion.
By the way: you can change the language for the user independently from the
system (yast). KDE should have its own setting.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
This worked. I also discovered that for some reason I had translations for both KDE3 and KDE4 installed. I guess that might have caused some problems. Removing the KDE3 translations and switching to English and back to German fixed the problem.
So, for anyone else who comes across the same issue, the moral of the story is double- and triple-check the packages you have installed…