Omnibus salutem.
I have been running my Macintosh computers in Italian for well over a year, and the effect has been very profound on the enhancement of my Italian. And so, for fun, I would like to translate programs or parts of my OSX into Latin. However, I have no idea how I might go about doing this. Any thoughts?
I don’t know how to do it, but I do have a thought. It looks like there are 15 possible system languages for OSX. Obviously there’s not going to be one in latin, but if you could poke around a little, you may be able to find the files for both the English and a language you are sure you will never want (lets say Brazilian Portuguese). If it works like other language setups I’ve seen, there will simply be long lists of possible messages. You could (maybe) over-write the words in the Brazilian Portuguese with your preferred Latin translation (using the comparable English file to guide you to what the actual message is). My guess is that it will take a lot of trial and error, but it could be fun. Then setting “Brazillian Portuguese” as the system language would really give you Latin.
Another option might be to do the same thing, but with one of the “other language packs” that you can download (see the link above). At least that way you wouldn’t have any trouble finding where the necessary files are. Of course, if it’s not saved in a text format, it may be nearly impossible (hex editor, maybe?).
This may be the kind of thing that would be better to try on a friend’s mac first…
I think you’d have to go into the program’s source code and rewrite the english commands/information in latin. like where it would say something like
#choice=raw_input(“What should I choose?”)
you’d use
#choice=raw_input(“qoud optabo?”)
(only I didn’t translate that correctly, obviously 
)
At least for OSX (and most major programs), I’m fairly certain it won’t be in the source code, because that would require different versions of compiled code for different languages, which would unnecessarily increase the size of the code 15X just to allow for the different language options. Usually the code will actually be something like this (to use the above example):
#choice=raw_input(langString[231])
The code itself is independent of the system language. There will then be a set of files/libraries (not necessarily in plain text) for each language. In the English file there may be a line something like:
231 “What should I choose?”
or it could be coded any number of ways. But, the key is, of course, don’t change the English! Change a different language’s set of strings, e.g.:
231 “Cuál debo elegir”
Manually change that to your latin, using the comparable English file to know which phrases are which. Then select the modified language as the system language. If you modify the English itself, or any other language you may want to try, then you won’t be able to revert back to it in the future without going through this whole process in reverse.
That’s a really wonderful idea! But how do I find where these files are? I also haven’t had any luck in finding the other language packs on those other Apple sites — I can’t read any of those languages, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to actually do it, since I don’t have a mac and have never tried it. They must be in a system folder somewhere, though if they’re not stored as text files they may be very difficult to find.
Another similar idea I just had, though, would be to make a latin version of phpbb. That’s the program that runs this forum. There are many languages already available for it, but latin (understandably) doesn’t seem to be one. They have instructions for how to do it (basically you do the process I described above on their specific set of text files). Then you’d just have to convince Jeff to make it one of the available languages for users under our profile (right now English is the only option). The nice thing about doing this is that people here could also benefit from the work. I don’t think it’s trivial to do, but at least it comes with instructions…
Here’s a small sample of the inside of one of the Italian language files for phpbb to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
Oohhh cool. Thanks for correcting me, edonnelly!
That’s a neat idea too, Ed! What application opens these php files? I’d actually love to make a php forum like this one anyway, but I’m not sure if I have any proper application to manage it.
They are simple text files, so they can be edited with any text editor. In the simplest case you could just modify the text files and convince Jeff to make it an available language for the users.
If you want to set up your own bulletin board, you need a web server program (usually apache) that runs php and a mysql database. All of the necessary software is free. You then need to get your computer online as a server. You can usually do this if you have cable/dsl or better (but not really if you have dial-up). It’s a bit of a project, and it may technically not be allowed by your ISP (though they won’t care unless it gets really busy) but once it’s going it can be pretty cool.
The other, simpler, option is to pay $5 - 10 a month for an account that provides you space on a server somewhere. It needs to offer php and mysql, but lots of them do. Then you can get a domain name for less than $10 a year (or even a free one from some places) and then you’re really set. I’ve had to set these up several times for different reasons, so if you’re looking to give it a try let me know and I’ll try to help however I can.
The hardest part, haha, is getting people to come to your forum.
Ed
You might have better luck finding documentation by using in the search string “internationalization” — often shortened to i18n, where the 18 stands for the number of dropped letters — and perhaps “localization”. The files that hold the different language texts are usually called catalogs.