"Googlebar: Translation Documentation"

Translation Documentation


Page last updated Apr 14, 2008

Introduction

One of the goals of the Googlebar is to be available in as many languages as possible, and to that end we have implemented the use of localizations. Essentially, this places all the text that might appear on the Googlebar (tooltips, titles, captions on pref panel, etc) in a few easy-to-access files ("googlebar.dtd", "googlebar.properties", and "locale.inf"), which are located in the appropriate locale folder for that language. The actual "overlays" that contain the code for the Googlebar do not contain the exact text- instead, they contain references to the character entities (form of &entityname; ) which hold the actual values displayed. By changing these values in the appropriate language folder once, anyone interested in translating the Googlebar to another language will have a file that can be created once and used in each new version of the googlebar (with updates for new entries, but this is much easier than re-translating each version). This documentation will allow anyone interested in translating the Googlebar to do so (starting with version 0.5, where this feature first appeared). We always recommend that new translators start with the latest "experimental" xpi from CVS, because new text strings are introduced for every new feature and any translation missing these text strings will not work with newer versions.


Steps to translate

  1. Download the XPI containing the latest copy of Googlebar. At any time, this version many have some bugs, but will contain the newest locale files needed.

  2. Locate the directory where the Googlebar is installed (depending on your install, this will be either in your profile or the Mozilla program directory). Inside will be a locale folder containing en-US -> Googlebar directories. The googlebar.dtd and googlebar.properties files, found here, contain the English language localization.
  3. To translate the Googlebar, create another folder in the locale directory with the appropriate code for your country (for example, a french translation would go in a folder named fr). Copy the googlebar folder found inside en-US to the new directory, including all the files inside.
  4. Now, edit contents.rdf. Essentially, this involves changing all those references to en-US to that of your own translation.
  5. Translate each of the text strings in Googlebar.dtd, paying attention to any comments inside. This changes the actual text of things on the Googlebar- button labels, menu items, etc.
    For example, when you see <!ENTITY googlebar.name "Google Toolbar">, translate just the words "Google Toolbar".
  6. There is also another file, googlebar.properties, which contains the text of things used by javascript, like error messages and the country domains for international google searches (such as when someone chooses the preference to search via google.co.uk). Do not translate the country codes, but if you would like to separately translate our project and help pages, feel free to change the relevant URLs to those in your language.
    For example, when you see gb.button.nav.prev.tooltip=Previous result, translate the phrase "Previous result". But when you see gb.country.x=CountryName, do nothing.
  7. At the moment, there is no easy way to change the default country for Google to search- it is set to google.com but may be changed by the user. Currently, changing the default country requires editing googlebaroverlay.js, but because these changes would be lost with every upgrade, we hope to soon add a way for the default country to be set along with the rest of the locale file.
  8. You may also want to translate the locale.inf file, located in the XPI in the same directory as the install script- this will allow the installation process to appear in your language as well, and should also be translated.
  9. Finally! It's time to test your translation. First, you need to tell the Googlebar it's there. Edit installed-chrome.txt (in your chrome folder where mozilla is installed) and change the en-US in the "locale,install,url,resource:/chrome/googlebar/locale/en-US/googlebar/" line (probably near the bottom of the file) to the name of your translation. Start mozilla and marvel at your own brilliance (hopefully). The localizations work by matching the languages you have installed with the language you chose as the default language for mozilla, so once you install your new language pack, it should take effect- so long as that language is the one you selected in Mozilla.
  10. If you have problems with the translation, post a note below and we will try to assist you. Otherwise, the Googlebarl10n project has been set up as a home for translated versions of the Googlebar, so visit the project page for information on how to submit yours. Thanks for the interest and hard work!!.


Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

A word of caution: as mentioned, each new version will likely require some maintenance of the translation. Everything that has been translated stays translated, but new text entities, properties, etc are often added with a new version, and must be included in the translation if it is to work with the newest version- make sure to update it once a release comes about. Using these entities to store text makes translation easier, but it also allows us to create custom fields for other XUL attributes and values that developers may want, allowing developers an easy way to customize the Googlebar beyond translation alone. As we get feedback from those interested as to what kinds of settings and values they may want to change in the Googlebar, this file will probably change to allow this sort of customization as well.

If there are questions or problems regading the documentation, let us know! Thanks for your interest.

User Notes: [?]

If you do not get a response to a question posted in this forum, please try sending a message to the project's mailing list or to the project owner directly.

[1] Submitted by: Alex Morotsky on Saturday June 1st 2002

I've created an XPI but it screwed up my Mozilla interface. Where can I send the file for testing?

[2] Submitted by: AndyB on Monday June 10th 2002

(Sorry for the delayed response)- Alex, you can send the XPI to me at wpl510@myrealbox.com , and I'll take a look and try and see where the problem is. Chances are, there may be something in the install script that I can spot and try to fix. What language are you working on?

[3] Submitted by: Greg on Tuesday June 18th 2002

I updated my GOOGLE.png file to be a scaled down version of Google's logo. If you want it, you're welcome to it:

http://gzapf.tripod.com/

[4] Submitted by: Manfred Meierbier on Wednesday June 26th 2002

I'm about to start translating googlebar to german. If this is already done, just mail to mmeierbier@yahoo.com, i'll then skip to french. Will inform u about progress of work.

[5] Submitted by: AndyB on Wednesday June 26th 2002

Before we implemented localization, someone had created a translation to German ( http://domfree.de/jozzi/googlebar.html ) the hard way, but I have no idea on whether they've tried to update it using localizations (and we have added lots of things since then), so you may want to check, and if not, we'd welcome a new German translation. You could also proofread a fairly up to date french translation that we have in CVS and see how that looks. Besides french, the only language I've seen a recent translation made for is Ukrainian (and for some bizarre reason we can't get the XPI to work, but I should make a bug to submit translations to)- people have seemed vaguely interested in Spanish and italian, but no word on whether they're actually working on either. Help on translating- or proofreading translations- is always welcome.

[6] Submitted by: Minh Nguyen on Thursday June 27th 2002

I'm working on a Vietnamese translation, and I need to use Unicode character entities, not Western European (ISO 8859-1) entities. Is it all right if I change the first line of content/googlebarOverlay.xul and content/pref-googlebar.xul to say this?:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Would I have to do anything else to make my translation work with Unicode?

- MXN

[7] Submitted by: Bren Mac Guire on Friday July 12th 2002

Being French, I can handle the proofreading of the trnaslation if you want. Besides I think I can do a Spanish translation, when I got enough time.

Just mail me to brenmacguire@caramail.com if you are interested.

[8] Submitted by: Dominique Fiori on Saturday August 17th 2002

French national - lived 11 years in ireland working on IT companies - passion 4 linux or anything teaching a lesson to Gates. Technician - translator ENG to FR and FR to ENG ( you pick ).

if you need someone to translate the Google Bar into french well just buzz me @ 00 33 6 73 87 32 62 or send a mail to dominiquefiori@numericable.fr

Warmest regards

Dominique Fiori- Wall

[9] Submitted by: Chuck Smith on Thursday September 12th 2002

You know, I've absolutely LOVED using Mozilla as a browers, and the flexibility of the project simply floors me every time I find a new plug-in to play with. I've been wondering how exactly I can get involved... my knowledge of programming is limited, but the whole idea behind XUL is that you don't have to have lots of that to make it work... I'd be willing to give a Japanese translation a shot. Again, though as with Minh's comment above, I'd need access to the Unicode character set... unless we can do Shift-JIS, but Unicode would be more uniform if it would work.

Comments, info, etc.: smith60@purdue.edu

Thanks!

[10] Submitted by: Itamar on Thursday October 10th 2002

OK, I have translted all the the googlebar.dtd and the googlebar.properties to Hebrew. I created "he" folder under the locale directory and changed the "en-US" to "he" in the installed-chrome.txt Nothing.... I managed to check my work only bu replacing the files under the en-US folder. Any ideas?

[11] Submitted by: Brendon on Thursday October 31st 2002

OK, I made a german translation, but this only worked when I used no special charactors, like ö, ü, ö or ß.
Any suggestions on how to incorporated these?

[12] Submitted by: Brendon on Thursday October 31st 2002

Oh, and by the way, changing gb.country did nothing. Actually there was no entry for this in "googlebar.properties" so I made one up, but this didn't acheive anything. Instead I had to hack googlebarOverlay.js. This worked, but isn't very elegant!

[13] Submitted by: AndyB on Thursday November 21st 2002

Brendon: The reason there was no gb.country entity was probably that you had an older version (xpi out of date). This has been remedied in newer versions; now the googlebaroverlay.js automatically fills in whatever value is in gb.country as the tld (for example, "com", "us", "de", etc) to send the search to that site. Come to think of it, a few other entities for highlighting were also added in the latest release (0.4.6RC3), proof this is still a bit of a work in progress and changing as we go.
To all our other interested translators, sorry for the abysmal response times of late, but things have been busy. Thanks many times over for all your interest. We're currently stuck with install issues for locales (bug 1932, where locales fail to install in some cases and end up taking googlebar down with them) and could use help; once this is resolved we hope to make 0.4.6 final and turn the focus to helping translators. If you're having trouble testing the translation the first time, you may try editing the references to the locale in chrome.rdf, another file in the same directory as installed-chrome.txt... this may work. And, if you have any idea what the root cause of the seemingly-random bug 1932 is (several have been suggested, but what works for one person isn't helping another), again, we'd appreciate the help. It's a big barrier to making translations a reality.

[14] Submitted by: Posicionamiento on Monday March 17th 2003

Hi from Spain!!

[15] Submitted by: wangtianyao on Thursday March 20th 2003

I am a chinese , I have translated the googlebar into chinese. but I don't know how to publish it, and whether I can join the googlebar team.

[17] Submitted by: Neil on Tuesday April 8th 2003

> XPI last updated 12/11/02

The line above should be updated whenever you replace the XPIrimental.xpi with a newer one.

[19] Submitted by: Robert on Saturday April 19th 2003

Thanks you for the web, it is what I needed to complete my work.
You do a very good work and you must feel proud of it.

[20] Submitted by: Filippo on Wednesday April 23rd 2003

I've translated the 2 dtd files in italian. How can I use it now? Can I send it to you? My email is filimori AT yahoo dot com. Bye

[31] Submitted by: Yeh You-Ying on Tuesday May 27th 2003

Hello, I'm trying to translate Googlebar to Traditional Chinese (Big5 character coding) as the steps in this page. After those steps, I did not see any change, Googlebar still used en-US locale.
Is there anything wrong with me ?
Thanks.

[32] Submitted by: François on Tuesday June 3rd 2003

Hi, I have made a XPI with a french localisation for GGBar 0.5.07. It seems to work with Moz 1.3/1.4b/1.4RC1, Netscape 7.0.2 and Firebird 0.6. Available at:

[33] Submitted by: François on Tuesday June 3rd 2003

Available at pages.infinit.net/shogix/

[34] Submitted by: jean-jacques on Friday July 11th 2003

Good greetings from St-Hyacinthe, Province of Quebec, Canada, a city at 40 kilometers from Montreal.

[35] Submitted by: Gerd on Wednesday July 16th 2003

What happened to all the translations?

Where can I find an actual translation for german?

[36] Submitted by: John Woods on Wednesday July 16th 2003

New translation page should be up in about a week or so.
We have a new translator's file, locale.inf in the most recent XPI-rimental.xpi(0.7.0.02), which if translated will allow installing to be done in that language. AndyB will be updating the transltion page with the how to do it details.

[37] Submitted by: Alex on Thursday July 17th 2003

A German Translation (and later hopefully more) is
available on the Localisation-Project GooglebarL10N:
http://googlebarL10N.mozdev.org/

[38] Submitted by: mmeierbier on Tuesday July 22nd 2003

I have been trying to use my translated googlebar, but since I installed it using the method describrd above, mozilla won't start anymore. As I have noticed now, a german translation (as I have tried) being already available at http//:googlebarL10N.mozdev.org , I will quit trying. Should anyone be interested in the translated files, just drop a word at mmeierbier@yahoo.com.

[39] Submitted by: Bernd on Tuesday August 12th 2003

Since localization has moved to googlebarl10n, I am closing this for new postings, please go to http://googlebarl10n.mozdev.org/feedback.html for localization questions and problems

[40] Submitted by: marthen on Wednesday 6th October 2004 at 14:07 -0400

manajemen resiko seharusnya sebelum terjadi ada bersiapan dari perusahan asurance?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)
[41] Submitted by: marthenbalyo on Wednesday 6th October 2004 at 14:09 -0400

coba dng laguage the indonesiaan?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)
[42] Submitted by: Mrqcace on Tuesday 2nd November 2004 at 07:59 -0500

How do I clear the cached former or past searched words I entered in the Google search bar that appear when I double click the Google Search Bar for a new search?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
[43] Submitted by: SHaRd on Sunday 21st November 2004 at 20:56 -0500

How Do i "UN-Hide" googlebar after i hid it???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Thundereagle/0.10.1 (All your Firefox/0.10.1 are belong to Firesomething)
[44] Submitted by: SHaRd on Sunday 21st November 2004 at 21:00 -0500

NVM I got it, sorry for posting on the wrong board

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Thundereagle/0.10.1 (All your Firefox/0.10.1 are belong to Firesomething)
[45] Submitted by: carlo on Thursday 2nd December 2004 at 03:27 -0500

es funktioniert nicht bei mir habe winxp server2 und klappt nicht ich bitte um hilfe????

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041027 Firefox/1.0RC1
[46] Submitted by: Iman Seyfi on Thursday 9th December 2004 at 16:50 -0500

The Download link was cuted because I faced Not file found error.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
[47] Submitted by: Ysbrand Scheeres on Monday 14th March 2005 at 14:49 -0500

In the Netherlands (in the 1940's) we were involved with German writing and many a typewriter could not handle these characters.
Instead of o-unlaut we just used oe
Instead of u-unlaut we just used ue
Instead of sz we just wrote ss
I haven't got the foggiest of the precise needs, but my three modifications were locally accepted
jackscheeres@juno.com

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Feedreader; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
[48] Submitted by: javitonino on Monday 13th June 2005 at 07:59 -0400

I would translate the experimental version of Googlebar to Spanish if I could find the files. I didn't find anything except for a XPI files in Documents and Settings. I have search for googlebar or locale folders but I have found nothing. Can anyone send me the files to javitonino@hotmail.com? Thanks in advance.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
[49] Submitted by: ali on Saturday 9th July 2005 at 18:05 -0400

hi
you have many toolbar and i dont know which one is beter. can you help me i download which one of them?


thanks

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
[50] Submitted by: joe on Tuesday 19th July 2005 at 19:32 -0400

how do you add gmail button?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
[51] Submitted by: amare on Friday 28th October 2005 at 14:29 -0400

ããßä ÊÍÞíÞ ÇÓÊÑÇÊíÌíÉ ÇáÚÈÞÑíÉ

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
[52] Submitted by: henry munevar on Saturday 5th November 2005 at 18:40 -0500

please let the world know that there is a henrysbaseballclub.com need to get the word out that we do exist henrysbaseballclub@hotmail.com post on athletic tipe sites amature baseball,training,baseball leagues etc.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
[53] Submitted by: yousfe hassani on Tuesday 8th November 2005 at 14:35 -0500

le jeudi est d'hapiuthd un joure de grande toilette mais

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
[54] Submitted by: stonebrokers on Tuesday 13th December 2005 at 17:44 -0500

How can I unblock the popup blocker, so that I can receive e-mails through google, because, apparently it's returning most of my e-mail, saying I don't accept it!!! Also, I don't get any sort of noise from google when a popup is blocked, like I do from Yahoo. What's up?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Advanced Searchbar 3.25)
[55] Submitted by: someoneudono on Tuesday 20th December 2005 at 19:21 -0500

how do i unblock the pop-up blockers?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
[56] Submitted by: henrysbaseballclub.c on Wednesday 1st March 2006 at 02:45 -0500

need players for the upcoming season. ages 17 to 25 for the pro independent leagues. play 90 professional games this summer.henry 781 891 0621. also need players for baseball training.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)
[57] Submitted by: GaryRBahr@PeoplePC.c on Saturday 22nd April 2006 at 17:35 -0400

How to is missing: it is very confusing and not clear what steps are used to download and use anything on this site???????????

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts)
[58] Submitted by: GaryRBahr@peoplepc.c on Saturday 22nd April 2006 at 17:37 -0400

Install with an auto loader; you know, like when you pull back the slide on a 12 gauge shot-gun! Bam, you're done....????/

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts)
[59] Submitted by: saman on Thursday 1st March 2007 at 01:37 -0800

salam iman seyfi to ro khoda plzzzzzzzzzzzzzz age mishe be maan mail bede karet daram
samansaatt@yahoo.com
plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
[60] Submitted by: mikail abdul hamid on Monday 18th June 2007 at 06:33 -0700

well i want to translate words from Arabic to english

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
User Notes: [?]

If you do not get a response to a question posted in this forum, please try sending a message to the project's mailing list or to the project owner directly.

User Notes: [?]

If you do not get a response to a question posted in this forum, please try sending a message to the project's mailing list or to the project owner directly.

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User Notes: [?]

If you do not get a response to a question posted in this forum, please try sending a message to the project's mailing list or to the project owner directly.

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