Greenfoot Translations

This page summarises translation efforts of Greenfoot into languages other than English.Translations are made by volunteers, and you can help translate if you like - volunteers for translations are always very welcome! Some information about how to make translations of the interface are at the bottom of this page. Mail us if you can help.

Available translations

	Greenfoot interface	Greenfoot API	Tutorial
Brazilian			Wombat Tutorial (Brazilian Portuguese) Herodoto Bento-DeMello
Chinese	included *) Wombat Yuan	API (Chinese) Eric Pan
Czech	included *) Zdenék Chalupský
Dutch	included *) Erik van Veen & Renske Smetsers-Weeda
English	included	API (English)
French	included *) Guillaume Baudoin
German	included *) Matthias Taulien & Stefan Mueller	API (Deutsch) Gunnar Johannesmeyer	Wombat Tutorial (German) Claus Eikemeier
Greek	included *) Mantzas Ioannis		Wombat Tutorial (Greek; .docx) Milolidakis Giannis
Indonesian			Wombat Tutorial (Indonesian) Ronald Yusuf D. Nainggolan
Italian	included *) Stefano Federici		Wombat Tutorial; Wombats Scenario; Wombats2 Scenario (Italian) Stefano Federici
Korean	included *) John Kim
Polish	included *) Przemysław Adam Śmiejek
Portugal	included *) Paulo Abadie & Fabio Hedayioglu
Russian	included *) Sergy Zemlyannikov		Wombat Tutorial (Russian) Sergy Zemlyannikov
Spanish	included *) Esteban Iglesias Manríquez		Wombat Tutorial (Spanish) Viviana Alvarez Tomé
Swedish	included *) Daniel Norrman

Many thanks to the translation contributors: Guillaume Baudoin, Herodoto Bento-DeMello, Stefano Federici, Mantzas Ioannis, Gunnar Johannesmeyer, Renske Smetsers-Weeda, Matthias Taulien, Zdenék Chalupský, Erik van Veen, Wombat Yuan, Maciej Wujciów, Viviana Alvarez Tomé

*) How to switch the Greenfoot user interface language

Translations of the Greenfoot user interface are included with the standard Greenfoot download.

Since Greenfoot 2.3.0, you can select the interface language from the preferences dialog within Greenfoot (under the "interface" tab).

For previous versions of Greenfoot, follow these instructions:

• Edit the property definitions file. This file is called 'greenfoot.defs'. You can find it at

  <greenfoot_dir>/lib/greenfoot.defs

  On a Mac, the role of the 'lib' directory is taken by a 'Java' directory deep inside the Greenfoot application bundle. To find it, Ctrl-click the Greenfoot application and select 'Show Package Contents'. Then navigate your way down the folders Contents/Resources/Java. Here, you will see the file 'greenfoot.defs' (and all other Greenfoot configuration files and directories).
  
  You can open this file in any plain text editor.

• The property definitions file contains properties in the form

  property_name=value

  Find the property named "bluej.language" (the name is historical) and set the value to the name of the language you want. For example:

  bluej.language=german

  That's it. Restart Greenfoot, enjoy!

• The 'bluej.defs' files also contains a 'bluej.language' setting, however, it is overridden by the setting in greenfoot.defs.
  

How to translate the Greenfoot interface

The Greenfoot implementation re-uses a lot of code from another system, called BlueJ. To translate the Greenfoot interface, both the BlueJ and Greenfoot labels have to be translated. All interface texts (labels, dialogues and help texts) can be found in plain text files in the Greenfoot 'lib' directory (read the section above for information on how to locate this directory).

In the lib directory, you will find subdirectories named "english", "german" and "swedish", and so on. These contain all the language dependent texts. Create a new directory for the language you want. Let's say you want to make a language setting for Islandic. In that case, make a directory named "islandic". Then copy all the files out of the "english" language directory into your new language directory. They are all text files.

Edit each of those files (ignore the greenfoot/api directory) and translate all the texts in them to Islandic (keeping the format of the files as it is). You can ignore the left-hand side of the equals on each line, you just need to translate the right-hand side. Once you have made the new Islandic directory, you can switch the Islandic language setting on as described above in the previous section, using the property setting

bluej.language=islandic

Note: many languages use non-Ascii characters. Greenfoot requires that these characters are encoded as unicode escape sequences ("\u" followed by a 4-digit hexadecimal value representing a unicode code point). You may wish to use the native2ascii tool (included with Java) to convert non-Ascii characters into the appropriate escape sequences.

If a directory for the language you want to translate to already exists, then most likely a translation has already been made for all BlueJ label files, and you only need to add the Greenfoot-specific labels. This is then a lot less work. All Greenfoot-specific labels are contained in the file 'greenfoot-labels' - only this file has to be copied across and translated.

At the time of writing, The following languages already have translations for the BlueJ labels, but not for Greenfoot (and thus should be quick to translate): Afrikaans, Catalan, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish.

If you do any translations, we would be very grateful if you would send us your language files for inclusion into the Greenfoot distribution. Someone out there might just be looking for an Islandic language setting... Thanks!