Revision as of 20:07, 22 October 2009

JAVA localization basics

You can translate the JAMS graphical user interfaces by editing JAMS language files. Those files contain lines of the format

<key>=<value>

where key is some string identifier and value a term in a certain language. An example would be:

ExplorerDisabled=JAMS Explorer is diabled in this version! 

The interfaces are translated by replacing the right part with the translated terms. In order to preserve a proper generation of combined terms, leading and trailing whitespace characters must be kept. The results must be stored in a file following the naming convention

<name>_<lcode>_<ccode>.properties

with the following meaning:

• <name> is a string describing the files content, i.e. "JAMSBundle" or "JUICEBundle"
• <lcode> is a 2-character abbreviation for the language name according to ISO 639-1, see http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php for a complete list.
• <ccode> is a 2-character abbreviation for the country name according to ISO 3166-1, see http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists.htm for a complete list.

As an example, the proper name for a file containing brazilian portuguese language strings for JAMS would be JAMSBundle_pt_BR.properties. In general, the country code can be omitted, e.g. JAMSBundle_pt.properties is a proper file name for portuguese translations in general.

In order to patch the language files of already existing JAMS libraries, proceed as follows.

• make sure you have the JDK java development package installed
• open a DOS command prompt
• change into the directory containing the JAMS *.jar files (cd c:\program files\jams\lib)
• extract the JAMS language file by running

 jar -xf jams-main.jar resources/JAMSBundle.properties

• translate the file resources\JAMSBundle.properties, save it and rename it to resources\JAMSBundle_<lcode>_<ccode>.properties according to the conventions described above
• write the modified file back to the archive by running

 jar -uf jams-main.jar resources/JAMSBundle.properties

• delete the extracted files by running

 rmdir /s/q resources

• extract the JUICE language file by running the command

 jar -xf jams-ui.jar resources/JUICEBundle.properties

• translate the file resources\JUICEBundle.properties, save it and rename it to resources\JUICEBundle_<lcode>_<ccode>.properties according to the conventions described above
• write the modified file back to the archive by running

 jar -uf jams-ui.jar resources/JUICEBundle.properties

• delete the extracted files by running

 rmdir /s/q resources