Merging and managing translations for maintainers

Several steps need to be done in the correct order to correctly merge and maintain the translation files.

There are scripts available for these, so usually the process will be as follows:

1. Download the translations in .po format.

2. Put them in lang/incoming/, ensuring they are named consistently with the files in lang/po/.

3. Run lang/update_pot.sh to update lang/po/cataclysm-BN.pot (requires python with polib and luaparser modules installed).

4. Run lang/merge_po.sh to update lang/po/*.po. (This is only used to test translations locally as the project now uses Transifex for translation)

   This will also merge the translations from lang/incoming/.

These steps should be enough to keep the translation files up-to-date.

To compile the .po files into .mo files for use, run lang/compile_mo.sh. It will create a directory in lang/mo/ for each language found.

Also note that both lang/merge_po.sh and lang/compile_mo.sh accept arguments specifying which languages to merge or compile. So to compile only the translation for, say, Traditional Chinese (zh_TW), one would run lang/compile_mo.sh zh_TW.

After compiling the appropriate .mo file, if the language has been selected in game settings, the translations will be automatically used when you run cataclysm.

When System language is selected in settings, the game tries to use language that matches system language based on language definitions file data/raw/languages.json.

If you’re testing translations for a new language, or the language does not show up in settings, make sure it has its own entry in the definitions file.