We are grateful that volunteers translate Audacity into many different languages. If you would like to help, please join the audacity-translation mailing list, and read the instructions below.

Resources for Translators

• Mailing list and archives
• Translating Audacity on the Audacity Wiki.
• wxWidgets i18n

Translation Instructions

Normally there will already be a translation for your language of the Audacity software, but often it needs to be updated for the latest changes. To update an existing translation, use the link below to download the .po file for your language:

• Development branch translations
• Release 3.3 translations

After clicking the link above, click on the link for the .po file for your language. On the page you come to, right-click “Raw” and then “save target” or “save link as” to download the .po file.

If there is no .po file for your language, create one by downloading the latest “audacity.pot” file instead (it’s in the same location). Rename the .pot to “audacity.po” before starting your translation.

Programs for creating and editing .po files:

• poEdit for Windows and Unix.
• Lokalize for KDE4
• Virtaal
• GNU gettext is standard on most Unix systems. It includes a PO mode for the Emacs text editor.

Basic usage of poEdit:

• For a newly created .po file, set its properties by clicking Catalog > Settings and filling in the required information. Set the target language in the Language menu. Make sure to set the “charset” option correctly, otherwise poEdit will not save any translations with non-English characters.
• For an existing .po file, download “audacity.pot” as above. In poEdit, click Catalog > Update from POT file to update your .po file with the latest strings from the downloaded .pot file. Then translate the .po file (not the .pot file).
• When you File > Save, poEdit saves the .po file, plus a .mo file for use in Audacity.

To test a translation in Audacity:

1. You can get an up-to-date alpha version of Audacity, NOT suitable for production use, but good for checking translations on, from our GitHub build artefacts.  Go to https://github.com/audacity/audacity/commits/master and click on the most recent green ‘check mark’.  From there, you’ll find there are choices of builds for different platforms.  We’re using CMake builds for Windows, Mac or Linux.  Download the right one for your platform.
2. On Windows, open the “Languages” directory inside the Audacity installation directory, then open the directory with the same name as your .po file. On Mac OS X, right-click or control-click over Audacity.app > Show Package Contents then open the relevant LPROJ directory inside the “Resources” directory. On GNU/Linux, open the relevant “locale” directory in usr/share/ or usr/local/share.
3. If creating a new translation, create a new directory for your language using the correct language code from the wxWidgets languageinfo.cpp file. For example, the code for Punjabi is “pa”, so on Windows, create “Audacity\Languages\pa”.
4. Rename the saved .mo file to “Audacity.mo”, and paste it into the directory you opened or created.
5. Open Audacity and in Preferences: Interface, choose your language and click OK. You should now see your translations.

Further information:

• To submit a translation, please send the completed .po file to the audacity-translation mailing list. A member of Audacity Team will commit the file and send a message to the list confirming this.
• Please read Translating Audacity for more tips on translating the Audacity source code, and to learn how the Audacity software is translated.