T.O.C.

Intro

QuickStart

Basics

Databases

Glossaries

Advanced

Scripting


 

WHAT IS IN THIS SECTION?

QuickStart is the minimal documentation you must read to use PowerGlot. It gives you the basics to allow you to quickly get to work. For further reference, read the other topics to get more information about PowerGlot.

 

 

INSTALLING POWERGLOT

There is nothing specific to do to install PowerGlot. Just launch the auto-extracting archive, select a destination folder, and the software will be installed at that place in a new folder named PowerGlot.

In the actual distribution format, the archive contains a few folders, all with items independent of the main application. The only folder that must remain in the same folder as the application is the "PowerGlot templates" folder. This folder contains files that PowerGlot uses to extract text from your files.

 

AN EXAMPLE: LOCALIZING SIMPLETEXT

LetÕs try to translate SimpleText, the simple text editor provided with all MacOS computers. YouÕll find SimpleText at the root level on your hard disk. If you donÕt see it, use the FinderÕs "Find" command to locate it.

LetÕs get organized. Create a new folder named, for example, QuickStart. Make a copy of SimpleText in this folder. In the QuickStart folder, create a new folder that youÕll name Localized. This folder will contain the localized version of SimpleText (while generating a localized application, PowerGlot uses the same name as the original, so you canÕt put it in the same folder as the original).

QuickStart folder image

 

START POWERGLOT

Doucle-click the PowerGlot application icon from the Finder. It starts and a new, empty database is created.

 

ADD SIMPLETEXT TO THE DATABASE

When the database window is frontmost, the last menu in the menu bar is always the Database menu. Select Add work files from this menu: a file selector box will appear. Go to your QuickStart folder, and double click on SimpleText. The "SimpleText" name will appear in the lower box of the window. Then click the Done button.

PowerGlot will now read the contents of SimpleText, and update the database window, which should look like this:

Database window image

 

SELECT THE TARGET LANGUAGE

Before doing any localization work, you should select the source and target languages. To do this, go to the Edit menu and select Database settingsÉ. The options window opens.

The default source and target languages are always set to English when you create a database. For our example, letÕs say we will translate SimpleText to French. To do this, click the popup in front of the Target language caption, and select French.

You can now click the OK button to record these options.

 

TRANSLATE SOME MENU ITEMS

We will now, as an example, translate some menu items. You first have to display the Menus text container. A text container is a logical grouping of the text contained in the application: strings belonging to alerts and dialog boxes are grouped together, menu strings are grouped together, and so on. A more complete description of text containers is available in Text containers chapter in the Basics section of this documentation.

For now, what we want is display the text belonging to menus. To do this, click the Text container popup (located in the topmost part of the database window, and select the Menus item.

Text containers pop-up

This will update the list in the middle of the database window to show the contents of the SimpleText menus. Click on the line containing the ÔNewÕ menu item. The bottom part of the window will activate, showing the original text in the ÔSource textÕ field. Click in the ÔTranslationÕ field and type in the translation (the French translation for ÔnewÕ is ÔnouveauÕ).

Translation field image

You can now press the Enter key on the numeric keypad. This will do two things: update the list to reflect the changes you made to the ÔNewÕ item, showing its translation of the right column of the list, and move to the next untranslated field, which appears to be the ÔOpenÕ item.

Translated menu item image

As you can see, there is a red checkmark in front of the New item: it means that there is a translation for this item (it does not mean that the translation is correct, but that you have entered something in the Translation field of the item).

If you wish, you can translate more items before jumping to the next step.

 

GENERATE THE LOCALIZED VERSION OF SIMPLETEXT

Now that you have done some minimal translations, you can generate a localized version of SimpleText to see the result of your work. Go to the Database menu, and in the Generate localized files submenu, select from original filesÉ.

 

PowerGlot will ask you to select the destination directory. Go to the QuickStart folder you created at the beginning of this example, double-click on the Localized folder, then click the button at bottom of the dialog box which should read ÔSelect LocalizedÕ.

 

Destination folder image

 

Once you have done this step, PowerGlot displays a window showing the progress of the localization. As you only have a few localized items, this should be done in a few seconds. Once the status window disappears, youÕll be back to the Database window.

 

HAVE A LOOK AT THE RESULT

To see the result of your localization, go to the Finder, open the QuickStart folder you created, then open the Localized folder. There is now a copy of SimpleText in this folder. Double-click this copy of SimpleText to start it, and once itÕs open click in the File menu. You notice that in place of the ÔNewÕ text, it reads ÔNouveauÕ: the translation you made before has been installed into SimpleText. ThatÕs it!

You are now finished with the PowerGlot QuickStart guide. You can select a more detailed section in the topics to browse the documentation, or explore PowerGlot by yourself.