Localization

Localization (a.k.a. l10n) is the process of improving the experience of non-English speaking users of a Synchronet BBS.

Important considerations

Although Synchronet does support UTF-8 terminals to a degree (primarily for output of non-ASCII characters), the native character set of files read/displayed by the Synchronet Terminal Server is CP437
The CP437 character has only limited support for non-English/Western locales, so if UNICODE characters are required to support a new language translation, that will provide additional challenges
Software localization usually considers other aspects of a locale beyond just language (e.g. currency indicators, number separators, etc.), but Synchronet is currently only focused on language localization
The Synchronet developers are primarily English-only speakers, so help from non-English speaking sysops and developers is very much needed for a fully-translated BBS experience
Although this article is in the “custom” namespace of the Synchronet Wiki, the hope is that Synchronet will eventually ship with full support for the most common non-English-speaking (but Western) users: French, Spanish, and German

ctrl/text.lang.ini file can be used to replace text.dat strings/substrings with translated/localized strings/substrings
text/menu/lang/* files can be used to replace menu files with translated/localized equivalents
The [JS] section of ctrl/text.lang.ini files can be used to replace any JavaScript strings that are passed-to/returned-from gettext() (see load/gettext.js)