When we initially were designing ChimeraX we thought about using Qt's language support, but that would have added significant overhead to the implementation effort, and since we had a small programming team and many years of development effort ahead of us to just get a useful working program together, we decided to skip including the language support and just use English text.

Translating the interface into another language is probably doable for some subset of the menus and tools, but would be quite a daunting task to do completely, since in many cases the text is programmatically generated based on what the underlying data contains.  For instance, there are functions in chimerax.core.commands for generating the plural forms of words on an as-needed basis.

--Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

On Oct 22, 2024, at 11:14 AM, Tom Goddard via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hi Junhua,

  That would be great to add some Chinese language support in ChimeraX.  We haven't looked into supporting languages other than English, but there are many Chinese speaking ChimeraX users.  ChimeraX uses the Qt window toolkit which has "internationalization" support.  Specifically ChimeraX uses the Python interface to Qt, called PyQt.  If you figured out how to customize the ChimeraX GUI text we'd be interested in including that in ChimeraX.  Your ChiimeraX distribution includes all the Python code which creates the user interface, so you could experiment with just changing the Python code in your distribution.  The ChimeraX code is also on Github here


Here is the place in the code where the top level File, Edit, Select, Actions, Tools, ... menus are created.


I guess the individual menu entries are added in many places in the code.  For instance the File / Open... entry is here


and it uses the add_menu_entry() function which probably is used to add all the menu entries


Let us know what you figure out.

Tom


On Oct 22, 2024, at 9:36 AM, 刘俊骅 via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Dear UCSF ChimeraX Developers,

I hope this email finds you well.

Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for developing such a powerful and versatile software as UCSF ChimeraX. It has been an invaluable tool for my research and visualization needs.

I have a question regarding the translation of the GUI interface language. I am interested in translating the interface into another language. Since I noticed that UCSF ChimeraX is based on Python, I was wondering if it is possible to modify certain .json, .py, or .xml files to change the displayed language. My intention is purely for personal use, and I have no plans to distribute or profit from any modifications.

Could you please provide any guidance or resources on how to achieve this? Any pointers or documentation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Best regards!

Junhua Liu 273667986@qq.com

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