Translating your GUI to Klingon using Amulet’s Multi-Language Feature

First, we need to get the proper font. Download and install the font here: http://www.evertype.com/fonts/tlh/

Once installed, convert the font(s) using the Amulet GEM Font Converter (launched from GEMstudio Pro’s File menu), making sure to include the Klingon character range, 0xF8D0-0xF8FF:

Next, open your project in GEMstudio, then generate a Portable Object Template (POT) file by navigating to the tools menu and select Generate POT File…

Save the file in the default location, which is the languages subfolder of your project.

Next, open up that file in Poedit (poedit.net) by selecting New from POT/PO file… from the File menu:

Then open the POT file you just saved from GEMstudio. Select the language for translation, which can be anything:

I chose Korean because the output files will automatically get named “ko.po” and “ko.mo” (which kind of reminds me of “Kling-On”), but you can rename this to any 2-4 ASCII character combination you wish later on.

We’re almost ready to start translating. If you start pasting in Klingon text now, you will just see a bunch of dots because Poedit isn’t using our new custom font. To Fix this, you can open the Preferences dialog from the File menu and add the custom font on the General tab:

Next is the actual translation. For this, I used the Bing translator using the “Klingon (pIqaD)” setting:

Copy the source text from Poedit to the English side of the translation and then copy the Klingon back into Poedit:

Once finished with all the strings, save the project into the same “languages” directory of the POT file. This does two things. First it saves the .PO (ko.po in this case) file, which is the language specific translation in a human-readable format. Second, it compiles the project into a .MO file (ko.mo in this case) which is usable by the Amulet OS to do the run-time translation. We’re done with the translation and now we can use it.

Back in your project, you need 2 things. First is to change the font selections on all of your text-based items (StringFields, Button labels, Static Text, etc) to the new Klingon font(s). Second, you either need a mechanism (usually a button) to change the language or you can set the default language of the project to our new file. Here is what the function (Href) of the button may look like:

And here is the project setting:

In my example project, this is the English:

And here is the Klingon Translation: