Localizing a Plugin

• Check out the source code for the plugin you want to add a translation to.
• Find the resource bundles that needs to be translated. They are often found in the src/main/resources directory.
• Copy the basefile for the bundle, i.e. the one without a language extension. The copy should have the same name as the original file, except for the addition of a language extension. If, for example, you want to translate the Checkstyle Plugin into Spanish, you would copy src/main/resources/checkstyle-report.properties to src/main/resources/checkstyle-report_es.properties.
• Edit the new file and translate all the properties. Do not change the formating of the file, i.e. keep the current indentation and line breaks. This makes it easy to use a graphical diff tool to find missing keys in the file.
• Convert the new file so that all non-US-ASCII characters are transformed into Unicode escapes, see below for a tool that can help with this.
• Run "mvn install" for the plugin.
• Configure a project to use the latest SNAPSHOT version of the plugin you are working on. Also configure the project to produce a site in the language you are adding a translation for. For Spanish, as we used in the example above, it would look like this:

    <build>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
          <configuration>
            <locales>es</locales>
          </configuration>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </build>

• Run "mvn site" on that project to test it.
• When you are happy with your translation, create an issue in JIRA for the plugin in question, with a description like this: "Add Spanish translation". Take note of the issue number.
• Create a patch file that contains your new translation. Use the issue number when you name the file:

  svn diff > MYISSUE-123.patch

• Attach your patch file to the issue in JIRA.

Tools

There is a command line tool called native2ascii that can be used to convert a text file to use Unicode-encoded characters instead of native-encoded characters. This is part of the Java SDK and you can read more about it here. You use it like this:

native2ascii checkstyle-report_es.properties checkstyle-report_es-encoded.properties

References

Please refer to the Java Internationalization home page for an introduction to the topic.

You can also refer to this Sun FAQ: How Can I Determine the Encoding of a File?