java i18n

Translations of OpenJDK / JDK standard resources to languages that are missing from official distributions. Only selected resources are translated, mainly GUI (Swing and AWT).

Currently translated to:

• ru

Background

Oracle JDK and OpenJDK offer localizations to a number of languages, and still there are more languages that are not immediately supported.

There is no big problem for an application programmer to have the messages of his own localized to any language, but localization of standard dialogs like JFileChooser is the next level of challenge.

Still, as Oracle JDK and OpenJDK do provide sources for the internationalization (i18n) resources, it is possible to add more translations to these resources.

Approach

I18n of standard UI components and messages is normally achieved via resource bundles that are implemented by PropertyResourceBundle or ListResourceBundle.

When it comes to i18n of standard UI components, PropertyResourceBundles are mainly used in OpenJDK main repository, while ListResourceBundles are used in Oracle JDK sources and also in some OpenJDK forks like Ubuntu OpenJDK. Both resource bundle formats work equally well and are perfectly interchangeable, at least as long as we deal with string data. Still when it comes to different scripts, ListResourceBundle format looks more Unicode friendly, as it does not require escaping.

Thus in order to add a new language to standard UI components, it is possible just to create a set of extra resource bundles and add them to the JVM configuration. And there is a standard technology for adding extensions to a JVM: the jre/lib/ext folder.

The darkbarker/java-i18n project, the predecessor to this one, used a mixed (ListResourceBundle / PropertyResourceBundle) approach. That approach, though sufficient to do the job, still requires extra tools for rendering escaped property values while development and is thus arguably convenient for customizations.

This current project uses ListResourceBundle throughout consistently. And the data is updated to fit JDK 8 amendments, with original OpenJDK resource structure retained as much as possible.

Prerequisites

The supplied binary build requires Java 1.5, though nothing prevents the source code from being compiled with any javac version since 1.1.

Versioning

Artifact/build versions are currently formatted like "YYYYMMDD" rather than using semantic versioning, as no versioning policy has evolved so far.

Building

A build.xml file for Ant build is available.

Distributions

The following distribution types are available:

• JARs with localized data for individual languages:
  • java-i18n-YYYYMMDD-usn-ru.jar
• JARs with localized data for all languages:
  • java-i18n-YYYYMMDD-usn-all.jar
• source distribution:
  • java-i18n-YYYYMMDD-usn-src.zip

The latest release can be found here.

License

The project is issued and distributed under GPLv2 license with classpath exception according to the oririnal OpenJDK license.

Usage – HOW-TO

• download or build the latest java-i18n-YYYYMMDD-usn-all.jar file or any of the individual java-i18n-YYYYMMDD-usn-??.jar files and add it to the jre/lib/ext folder of the JRE that you use;
• enjoy :)

See also

• darkbarker java-i18n project - the ancestor of this project
• OpenJDK: The Internationalization and Localization Group

Extras

Replacement patterns for conversion of .properties format to .java format

• convert empty comment lines to plain empty lines: find ^[\s&&[^\n]]*#$, replace with empty string
• convert non-empty comment lines: find ^[\s&&[^\n]]*#[\s&&[^\n]]?([^\n]+)$, replace with \ // $1
• convert property key/value pairs: find ^([^=\n]+)\s*=\s*(.*)$, replace with \ { "$1", "$2" }, // $2
• extract mnemonics in converted values: find , "[^&"]*(&.)[^"]*?(:?)", replace with , " ($1)$2"