Internationalization with Qt VS Tools

The good news for people using Qt VS Tools addin is that translations work very well from within the Visual Studio environment. The whole lifecycle of translations in Qt, that is:

• use tr() method to wrap all translatable strings
• create the .ts files with lupdate command
• translate using Linguist
• create the compiled .qm files with lrelease command

can be carried on without any issues, see more information here.

Embedded translations or not?

The fantastic internationalization support for text output provided by Qt makes use of translation files, which are created as the end result of a process of extracting the strings that are passed to tr() functions, translated into the desired language(s) and then generating fast compact versions (.qm files) of those translation files ready for use by the application.

Dynamic translations with substituting arguments

I already expressed the importance of developing localized applications, in particular, using the tools provided by Qt framework for translating strings. From time to time, you'll be dealing with phrases that may include some dynamic text, it is, you likely don't know the exact phrase at translation time. For such situations, you may resort to variables within the phrases.

Extending QTranslator

Although internationalization with Qt has very good tools to deal with translations inside an application, I was posed with the requirement to use existing files with proprietary format for the actual translated strings.