The most prominent feature of I18NEdit is its support for translating a project. The translator chooses a source and a target locale and I18NEdit shows all properties which have to be translated. I.e. it shows those properties which have been added or chenged in the source locale since the last translation run. I18NEdit leaves out everything that is already up to date!
Preparing I18NEdit for this workmode is a two-step process:
Select "Project → Translation settings" to open the translation configuration. Set your source and target locale.
The localisation mode menu
Set the search mode by "Search → Search for missing translations". The element editor on the right will chenge its colors: The source locale's background becomes orange, the target's one green.
Item presentation in translation search
Now, you can start translating very efficiently with the "Search → Continue search" menu item. By pressing F2, I18NEdit will jump to the first property in the project (from the currently shown property forward) where the value in the source locale is not translated or has been changed since the last translation. Edit it and press F2 again to go to the next property in the same way.
A property is shown for editing only if:
it is empty in the target locale
it has been edited in the source locale after the last editing in the target locale.
If you leave a property empty intentionally, it will be shown each time while traversing the project. To prevent an empty property from being shown, you can enter the word "EMPTY" (just this word in upper case letters, no surrounding blanks, no quotation marks) into the comment field of the target locale above the content edit field. I18NEdit will leave that property out from thereon.
Explicitly set a translation to stay empty.
Leaving a property empty in this way does only make sense under two circumstances:
You translate from the default locale into another locale where the default locale does not only contain translateable strings, but also more generic values (like size of an edit field or class names). In this case, you do not want to "translate" those generic values as they might change in the source locale in the future and a non-changed incarnation in the default locale can lead to errornous behaviour of the program.
You translate from a generic language locale into a more specific one (e.g. from Portugese into Brazilian Portugese) and want to leave out those properties which are equal in both locales. It should be mentioned that I18NEdit does not support this operation mode very well so far.
Under some circumstances, it can happen that the source locale becomes more current than the target locale but the target does not have to be changed, e.g. due to spelling errors in the source locale. As timestamps are only updated when real changes occur, the pair will be shown each time during transition. In this case just make a "phantom change": Simply add a space or any other character and remove it immideately afterwards. Pressing "F2" then will update the timestamp accordingly.
And well - that's it. Now you can traverse the whole property stuff. You can do translations or not. If you are unsure about a specific item, just leave the field blank and you will be remembered each time you go through the properties. So you can leave the difficult cases for later. Note that you do not need to store anything explicitly - I18NEdit stores everything just automatically. When you close the program and reopen it, it will reload the project(s) that were open when quitting.
Of course, you can also edit the properties files outside I18NEdit. When you reload any of such files into I18NEdit, it will discover the change and adjust the timestamp for the appropriate entry to current time. In fact, developers will work almost always this way...
If you have enabled the check for superfluous items, I18NEdit checks for each property bundle if the target locale contains entries which are not available in the source locale. If so, it presents a query dialog and asks whether these entries in the target locale should be deleted.
Confirmation dialog for superfluous entries
Answering "Yes" will delete those superfluous entries in the target locale, "No" will leave them untouched. "Cancel" will also leave them and additionally stop all further superfluousness checks until the menu item "Search → Check superfluous items" is enabled again.