Useful Tools to work on Translations
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Each Magento translation consists of a number of CSV files. Here you can find a few useful tools that might help you to work on them easily.
Please feel free to update this page and add the tools that can help community members to translate Magento in multiple languages.
Electronic spreadsheet editors |
Most of the spreadsheet editors can import, export CSV files and are able to edit them.
OpenOffice Calc |
Calc is an electronic spreadsheet editor that is a part of OpenOffice.org office suite. Openoffice is a multiplatform and multilingual open-source office suite. The product is free to download and use. You can find and download a binary or package for your operating system on the OpenOffice.org project official site.
When you will try to open CSV files in Calc it will show you a dialog, where you will be able to select/modify CSV import settings. The required settings to work with Magento CSV files are encoding (Unicode UTF-8), fields separator (comma) and text separator(double quotes).
Microsoft Office Excel |
of Microsoft Office software suite. You can find more information on it on the Microsoft Office Excel official homepage.
For the most part, Excel will automatically open/import CSV files. The real problem is saving. Microsoft has its own proprietary way of doing things, which results in non-standard formatting data that Magento chokes on. This is especially true for Mac users.
The most straightforward way to check an excel file is to open and resave in a simple text editor (NotePad on PC, TextEdit or BBedit on mac). You may be able to find/replace formatting problems (e.g. row & table widths, line returns, double-quote issues, and malformed line break characters), save as a UTF-8 CSV, and hope for the best.
Perhaps the best advice is to not use Excel in the first place. Or, copy your data and paste it into another program listed here, such as OpenOffice.
CAT tools |
Read the following guide to translating Magento using translation memory/CAT tool (free)
Text Editors |
If you are a geek and you really know the CSV format specification, you may use any text editor that supports Unicode to edit CSV-files directly.
Custom Tools |
Listed hereafter some custom tools for editing CSV files: A GOOD + FREE program (actually a CardWare, meaning you have to send a postcard to the SW author) is CSVed, capable of ‘massaging’ CSV files anyway you want. There you find also uniCSVed with UniCode capabilites, limited to Windows 2K & XP, only. Also there: a brief but very interesting CSV introduction & tutorial Feel free to add here any more CSV programs for authoring, editing, etc...
