This document describes the process of creating and maintaining translated texts for JMeter in languages
other than English. English has been tacitly chosen as the project's primary (or "default") language -- despite its
obvious inadequacy for reasonably unambiguous communication -- as a tribute to the Power of the Empire :-)
The metropolitan language texts are thus maintained by the software developers, while other project contributors
(called "translators" in this document) take care of maintaining the texts in the languages of the
provinces. The process of producing and maintaining the later is called "translation" in this document.
This document assumes you'll be using i18nEdit as your tool to edit properties files, and instructions will be specific to this software, but this is not mandatory: the process should mostly work also if you prefer to use another tool, such as or vi or Emacs.
This document describes 6 processes:
If you want to help with JMeter's translation process, start by reading this document. Then send a message to dev@jmeter.apache.org stating your intention. The files you need (*.properties and *.metaprop) are included in the source archive. But if you are having any difficulty, one of the project contributors will be able to grab the current texts from SVN and send them to you. You'll receive a jar, zip, tar or tgz file that you'll need to unpack in your local disk.
If you are familiar with SVN or you're brave, feel free to anonymously connect to the Apache SVN server and obtain the JMeter source yourself, as described in http://jmeter.apache.org/svnindex.html -- the files necessary to the translation process are all under the jmeter/src directory.
Once you've unpacked or checked out the files, make sure to find file src/i18nedit.properties in there: you'll need to know where it is to start working with i18nEdit.
If you have access to JMeter's SVN repository and you want to pack the files necessary for localisation
for sending to a translator, just go to the directory above the project root and issue the following command:
tar czf jmeter-localisation.tgz `find jmeter/src -name "*.properties" -o -name "*.metaprops"`
Of course you could also send the translator the whole jmeter directory, but this will make his life easier.
The runtime for i18nEdit can be obtained from http://www.cantamen.com/i18nedit.php. Download the binary distribution (i18nedit-1.0.0.jar) and save it locally.
To run i18nEdit, just make sure to have a reasonably modern Java Runtime Environment in your PATH, change
to the directory where you saved i18nedit-1.0.0.jar, then issue the following command:
java -jar i18nedit-1.0.0.jar
Then:
Before you start translating, select the "Project" menu, then "Translation settings". Choose work mode "Directed translation (source to target)". Enter "en" (without the quotes) in the "Source localization" field. Enter the ISO code of your target language in the "Target localization field".
Click on one of the editable fields in the right panel ("Comment" or "Content" for your language). Press F2. i18nEdit will bring you to the first property that requires your attention, either because a translation does not yet exist for it or because the English text has changed since the translation was provided. Enter or fix the text if necessary, then press F2 again to repeat the process.
i18nEdit's on-line help is excellent: read through it for more information and tips.
Once you're done translating, just pack up the whole set of files in jmeter/src in a jar, zip, tar, tgz, or alike and attach them to a JMeter bug report (follow link to "Known bugs" in JMeter's home page for that).
If you're a committer receiving text files from a translator, follow this steps to merge them into the project: