Zenmap in Your Language

Zenmap has been translated into a few languages other than English. Figure 12.18 shows what Zenmap looks like in German. This section shows how to use Zenmap's translations.

Figure 12.18. Zenmap in German

On Unix-like systems, you select your preferred language by setting the LANG environment variable. Even on other operating systems with different language selection facilities, setting LANG is the most foolproof way to get translations when other methods don't work. Your Unix-like operating system may set LANG as a side effect of its language configuration. If it does not, add a line like the following to your .login or .profile, replacing de with your locale name:

export LANG=de

A locale name is a language code optionally followed by a country code and sometimes other information. Language codes are from ISO 639 and country codes are from ISO 3166 . Here “de” means German; another example is “pt_BR” for Brazilian Portuguese. To disable localization entirely and use the default English text, set LANG=C.

To set LANG on Windows XP, follow these steps. Open the Control Panel and choose the “System” item. Click the “Advanced” tab and then the “Environment Variables” button. A new display will open up; under “User variables” click “New”. In the form that appears enter “LANG” for the variable name and your locale name for the value. The process is illustrated in Figure 12.19.

Figure 12.19. Setting the LANG environment variable on Windows XP

On Mac OS X, setting LANG in a shell startup file as described above has an effect only when Zenmap is started from a terminal. The graphical Finder interface keeps its environment variables in a separate file, .MacOSX/environment.plist. To create it, open the TextEdit application and enter the following, replacing de with your locale name:

{ LANG=de; }

Then from the “Format” menu choose “Make Plain Text”. Open the “Save” dialog, select your home directory and click “New Folder”. Create a folder called .MacOSX and click past the warning that appears. Save the file with the name environment.plist, and insist on the extension .plist in the next warning that appears. Finally, log out and back in to make the change take effect. A portion of this process is shown in Figure 12.20.

Figure 12.20. Setting the LANG environment variable on Mac OS X

Creating a new translation

Creating a new translation for Zenmap, or updating an existing one, is not hard technically, though of course it requires some know-how and knowledge of at least one language other than English. Zenmap's translations are handled by the GNU gettext system, which is documented fully at http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/. This section is a summary of the manual translation process. There also exist specialized translation editing programs that do these steps automatically.

Let's say you are going to make a translation into Spanish, which has the language code “es”. Within the Zenmap source tree there is a plain-text file share/zenmap/locale/zenmap.pot containing all the translatable strings in the application. You create a new portable object (.po) file by running msginit -l es.po -i zenmap.pot. The new es.po file contains all the application's English strings followed by blank strings where you fill in the appropriate translations.

To test the portable object file you must turn it into a machine object (.mo) file. Create the directory es/LC_MESSAGES and then run msgfmt es.po -o es/LC_MESSAGES/zenmap.mo. With this file in place Zenmap will use your translation when LANG is set properly. To update the portable object file when zenmap.pot changes, run msgmerge -U es.po zenmap.pot. This will add new strings and mark any obsolete strings so they can be removed.

When you start a new translation, announce your intention to the nmap-dev mailing list. The mailing list is also a good place to get translation advice. Then when you are finished, send in the .po file.