Inkscape Translation Contribution, and Other Short Stories

2024年12月25日 09:39

As the title stated, my Traditional Chinese translations are included in Inkscape 1.3.1 and onwards. This is my first serious contribution to an open source project, and I’m pretty glad seeing my work actually applied onto the software. I hope they will make the experience better for Traditional Chinese Inkscape users. But how did I come to use Inkscape in the first place, and how did the translation process go? Here’s some notes…

So I started using Inkscape

I’ve heard of Inkscape a long time ago, but never got around to use it, because I was more content with programs like GIMP and Krita to do design work. To be honest, Inkscape (and other vector editors) scared me with the initial learning curve. As luck would have it, I’m a bit burnt out around June 2023 by all the drumming gigs I did in May, and tried to find other things to do, so I decided to try Inkscape for my next graphic design commision for a summer camp. It turned out to be a great decision.

At first I watched various tutorials on YouTube to grasp how shapes, node editing and text wrangling work in Inkscape, and was attracted to the “Text on Path” feature — I can’t believe I missed out this the whole time on other image editors. After doing more work and trying out features like vectorizing photos, laying out documents, and creating letterings, I’m completely sold on Inkscape. However my problem with the software lies in the state of Traditional Chinese translations.

Translations and UI

The Traditional Chinese translations of Inkscape at the time was, let’s say, lacking. There were visible untranslated parts everywhere, namely in the Align and Distribute dialog, the dialog tab names, parts of the menu items, in the settings, and in the tooltips. My gripe was that some of them were partially translated, meaning that maybe the tool name was translated but the tooltip wasn’t, or in the case of the Align and Distribute dialog, some align options were and some weren’t, even though they are similar functions.

To be fair, before I jumped in and started translating, I didn’t know that some parts look untranslated because the source in English changed subtly, rendering the previous translation obsolete, therefore not showing up in the interface.

So I wondered who can translate the interface, who did the translations previously, and as it’s an open source project, if I could somehow help with the translations.

Read more about ltlnx's journey into contributing to Inkscape on their excellent blog page.

Big thanks to the community for contributing to Inkscape and for sharing their stories with us.