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Translating Zoom Player to new languages

To translate Zoom Player to new language requires following a set of rules.

The Rules

In order to translate the Zoom Player Language files you must follow these rules:

  1. You must be using Windows 2000/2003/XP (or newer).

  2. You must use a unicode enabled text editor that will not word-wrap (divide long lines into multiple lines) as that will corrupt the language file. I recommend Notepad++.

  3. It is VERY important that the number of lines remains unmodified, you may not leave empty lines or add your own lines to the text as that would corrupt the language file.

  4. There are certain special codes in the text files that you must NOT modify in any way.

    "%s" = String variable
    "%d" = Digit variable
    "\n" = Line Break

  5. You must translate the following files:

    "English.string"

    (General text used throughout)

    "English.dialog"

    (Texts for all the dialogs)

    "English.menu"

    (Right-click menu script)

    "English.keyhelp"

    (Keyboard macro list)

    "English.keylist"

    (Virtual Keyboard Key layout)

    "English.zpic"

    (Text used by the Install Center Dialogs)

    "English.zpicd"

    (Text used by the Install Center Component Database, only becomes visible once integrated into the On-Line database)

  6. When translating, rename the files to the name of the language, for example:

    "German.string"
    "German.dialog"
    "German.menu"
    "German.keyhelp"
    "German.keylist"
    "German.zpic"
    "German.zpicd"

  7. You must not use the "(" character as part of the new language file name.

  8. When translating "English.keyhelp", make sure to check that it fits well within the interface (Press F1 to bring up the interface from within Zoom Player).

  9. Instructions for translating "English.keylist" are contained within the file itself.

  10. You do not need to translate the instructions on how to translate or any other comments or translation hints embedded in the language files (lines starting with "//" or "#").

  11. All translations should be posted to the Zoom Player's reddit community.

Tips

Upgrading language files to a new version

When upgrading a previous translation, you can use the language rebuilding tool to simplify the update process, for more information, see this post on Zoom Player's reddit community.

Using AI to translate Zoom Player

You can use AI to help with the translation

Sample prompt for the ".dialog" file

The following text contains the content of a language file for Zoom Player, a media player for windows.

The purpose of this file is to help translators translate Zoom Player into new languages and includes instructions on how to do so in the initial comment section (lines starting with the "#" character).

Please read the content of the language file and the translation instructions and translate the document (not the instructions, the actual document) to [Insert_Language]:

Sample prompt for the ".string" file

The following text contains the content of a language file for Zoom Player, a media player for windows.

The purpose of this file is to help translators translate Zoom Player into new languages and includes instructions on how to do so in the initial comment section (lines starting with the "#" character).

Please read the content of the language file and the translation instructions and translate the document (not the instructions, the actual document) to [Insert_Language]:

Sample prompt for the ".menu" file

The following text contains the content of a language file for Zoom Player, a media player for windows.

The purpose of this file is to help translators translate Zoom Player into new languages and includes instructions on how to do so in the initial comment section (lines starting with the "//" characters).

Please read the content of the language file and the translation instructions and translate the document (not the instructions, the actual document) to [Insert_Language]. There are only two fields that may require translation in each AddMenuItem line, "Caption" and "SubMenu", leave the rest of the text untouched:

Sample prompt for the ".keyhelp" file

The following text contains the content of a language file for Zoom Player, a media player for windows.

Translate the English text to [Insert_Language], do not edit the spacing or keyboard shortcut sections (Alt, Ctrl, Shift,etc), only the English text. Do not strip space characters from the text:

Proper AI use

Depending on the AI's context window size, it may require pasting the file a few 100 lines at a time and asking the AI to repeat the translation for the new text. For example, using Google's Gemini Flash 2.5 AI, I was able to feed it 500 lines at a time.

It is very important to verify the lines in the English file and your own language are aligned, no extra lines can be inserted by the AI or yourself when assembling the file. The best way to do so would be using a file comparison tool between the original English and your chosen language.

AI issues

Some things I noticed when using AI to translate the files were :

  • Very long lines were not translated at all, skipped by the AI.
  • The AI replaces the space characters with a unicode character that looks like space and isn't (easy fix using search & replace).
  • Very rarely, extra lines were inserted containing fragments of text from earlier in the translation.