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Is it possible to translate mirc in different languages ​​(eg Turkish)?

Multi-language support for options and messages in mIRC



Many users have difficulty understanding English when configuring client options.
Is there a chance that someday there will be multilingual support in options and messages in the mIRC client?

This task can be greatly facilitated by providing such a translation option for users themselves through a language file.
Let's say: "mircdir/language/en_US.lang". This file can contain all the texts for options and messages in windows, with the help of which you can easily create your own file in your native and understandable language.
For example, copy a file in English and create your own file with the name: "ru_RU.lang" - translate all texts into Russian in it, and then it can be connected to the client in the options for translation into your language.

This will greatly facilitate the use of the client for many users around the world, raise it to a new level, and also greatly simplify the life of the developers of their project and scripts.

Hey Epic,

This is an awesome idea. Wish if i could see the software in my local language some day. This will really help everyone from different countries.

This has begun in the past, but it's gotten stalled. See the link below.

https://forums.mirc.com/ubbthreads....e-before-adding-the-languages#Post264224

Another comment I would make is that the coverage of language support would depend on which languages had people willing to volunteer their time to help with translating into a language they're much more familiar with than Khaled could ever be. There are always nuances that a native speaker would understand, making it obvious when someone tries to give them a translation created by a machine. Like in Google Translate, when I translate 'United States' into Chinese, it gives me 2 symbols. When I tell it to translate those 2 symbols back to English, it comes back as 'America', which is not the same thing. And I don't know whether the change happened on the outbound or inbound translation. And then when I insert a carriage return to have the 2 symbols be on separate rows, the translation changes to 'nice country'.

So, a translation into Turkish would need the help of native Turkish speakers. And my track record of trying to Turkish users has been frustrating, when I have trouble getting help from them to figure out their problem. There's even been several forum posts here where Turkish speakers are wanting help so that mIRC's UTF8 could be made compatible with their irc server which has never updated from using the old code pages system. Raccoon had made several offers to create such a script for them, but he needed some help from them to see if what he was coming up with works, but they never replied.

If Khaled did add language support, he's going to need help from those wanting menus translated into their native languages, and I wonder how much cooperation he's going to actually see.

Thank you for your comment. I understand what you mean. But my idea was not to have all the translation done personally by Khaled or a group of enthusiastic people, but on the contrary, I propose to simplify the solution of the problem. To do this, you need to make only 1 file in English by default with all text messages, texts for menus and options that are used in mIRC, so that each user of the client can make an independent translation into his native language based on this file (probably with his own additional explanations), if they need such a translation. That is, to provide this opportunity to everyone who needs it.

Users should be able to add a new file with all the texts through the mIRC options for it to take effect and change the client language.
I think this will make managing and configuring mIRC a lot easier for a lot of people to use and make them a little happier.

Just as a FYI. A while back I tried to work on a DLL that would allow doing pretty much what you propose: replace mIRC's standard text strings with translations as taken from a file. I abandoned this project after reaching the conclusion that point #9 from Khaled's list (in the post maroon linked) really has to be resolved first: most of the text boxes in mIRC's dialogs are just big enough to fit the English text, and so any translation with wider text gets cut off. Either Khaled would first have to make a more "flexible" dialog system (which is probably a lot of work), or every translator would have to adjust the positions and sizes of all controls in all dialogs to make the translations fit (..a downright nightmare). I really do like the general idea of being able to translate parts of mIRC, and I don't think all of Khaled's points are needed to get useful results, but I guess my point here is that right now, it is not easy even to get something simple going.

I would love to contribute a Turkish translation for mIRC, but as you've mentioned, the fixed Windows layout system would require constant checking and tweaking.

It might require to find the sweet spot between abandoning support for older Windows releases and supporting a newer layout API.

Curious if you're planning to translate the documentation too? It's not always obvious what changes are made to the mirc.chm between versions, since it's not always having changes only for the new/updated commands/identifiers. And don't forget that there are some parts of the documentation that's only in version.txt

Yes, you're right, it won't be easy to do. Probably need to set the maximum possible pixel width (with a margin for other longer texts) to edit text translation in dialog boxes for all options, and if the text does not fit within these boundaries, it will be automatically cropped. In turn, the authors of the translation will have to somehow adjust in order to meet these restrictions using abbreviations in the text. In any case, it will already be their own translation of the text and they will be able to decide how to do it correctly, so that it looks aesthetically pleasing and as clear as possible in their native language.

It might be another option if all dialog boxes with options were given the ability to resize, so that the width and height of the dialogs could easily be changed to the required dimensions to fit any long description.


Most likely yes, I think that someday I could do translation for the accompanying help documentation "mirc.chm", but this is already a secondary issue and is more needed for advanced users who are involved in scripting. In addition, this can be done not for every new release of the client, but only when the most important and breaking changes are made.

According to my observations over the years, people have always encountered difficulties in setting up mIRC due to not knowing English, so I know for sure that people would like to get the client settings that are understandable in their language, which are located in options the client, even if for this they to them have to do everything on your own. In addition, the most successful text files with translation will later be distributed on the internet to users whose native language is different from English, and the most successful text translations in the future could be included and added to the "languages" folder in the official release of the mIRC client.