Localizing a PyQt app on MacOS OSX

Brief notes, possibly wrong, from my experience:

Your app must negotiate with OSX using QLocale.uiLanguages, to decide what translators to install.  You have translated your app’s localizable strings to a set of languages (using Qt tools for i18n.)  OSX has a prioritized list of the languages the user prefers (from System Preferences>Languages.)  Your app must find the best fit.  Your app using translators for the language given by QLocale.system().name() is not usually the right thing to do.

In Info.plist, the key CFBundleLocalizations, which appears as key “Localizations” in the Xcode GUI.  I don’t think this has any effect on how OSX treats your app.  I think it is just used in marketing, that is the stores use this to decide whether your app should be in a store in a certain country.

In OSX, a terminal always shows environment variable LANG equal to ‘en’ or similar, that is, English.  Unless you change your environment variables, or the settings of the terminal.  That is, this is not affected by the user reprioritizing languages using System Preferences>Languages.

The file locversion.plist does not seem to be necessary anymore (on OSX 10.9 and Qt5) to get a Qt app to be localized (despite what certain Qt documentation says.)

OSX knows what translations your Qt app supports only by the set of xx.lproj folders in the Resources folder of your app bundle.  For a Qt app, these xx.lproj folders will contain little if anything, just a placeholder, say a single Localizable.string, which really is not used by your app.  By “OSX knows” I mean: OSX translates native dialog strings according to.  Much of your GUI is from Qt, and is translated by Qt, but Qt displays some native dialogs (provided by OSX) and these are localized by OSX according to the presence of the xx.lproj files.

A localization has these components:

• native dialogs (localized by platform, but depends on your bundling/packaging) e.g. “Save File” dialog
• Qt dialogs (localized by Qt project, e.g. qt_xx.qm) e.g. standard button “Cancel”
• your GUI face (localized by your projects .ts files)

In a PyQt projects, localizable resources will be in a myApp_rc.py file.  Your app won’t contain any localizable resources that OSX understands or needs, i.e. in myApp.app/Contents/Resources.

To test, use System Preferences>Languages.  Move a language to the top of the list and close the dialog.  Don’t restart your computer (that just means that Finder, and other apps already running, may not use the chosen language until you do restart, or unless the apps are designed to change language dynamically.)  Start your app.  All the components listed above should appear in the chosen language.