Language files for Vim Translated menus ---------------- The contents of each menu file is a sequence of lines with "menutrans" commands. Read one of the existing files to get an idea of how this works. More information in the on-line help: :help multilang-menus :help :menutrans :help 'langmenu' :help :language The "$VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim" file will search for a menu translation file. This depends on the value of the "v:lang" variable. "menu_" . v:lang . ".vim" When the 'menutrans' option is set, its value will be used instead of v:lang. The file name is always lower case. It is the full name as the ":language" command shows (the LC_MESSAGES value). For example, to use the Big5 (Taiwan) menus on MS-Windows the $LANG will be Chinese(Taiwan)_Taiwan.950 and use the menu translation file: $VIMRUNTIME/lang/menu_chinese(taiwan)_taiwan.950.vim On Unix you should set $LANG, depending on your shell: csh/tcsh: setenv LANG "zh_TW.Big5" sh/bash/ksh: export LANG="zh_TW.Big5" and the menu translation file is: $VIMRUNTIME/lang/menu_zh_tw.big5.vim The menu translation file should set the "did_menu_trans" variable so that Vim will not load another file. AUTOMATIC CONVERSION When Vim was compiled with multi-byte support, conversion between latin1 and UTF-8 will always be possible. Other conversions depend on the iconv library, which is not always available. For UTF-8 menu files which only use latin1 characters, you can rely on Vim doing the conversion. Let the UTF-8 menu file source the latin1 menu file, and put "scriptencoding latin1" in that one. Other conversions may not always be available (e.g., between iso-8859-# and MS-Windows codepages), thus the converted menu file must be available. Translated messages ------------------- This requires doing "make install" in the "src" directory. It will compile the portable files "src/po/*.po" into binary ".mo" files and place them in the right directory.