I am currently working on translating GIMP 3. I have almost finished translating it,
and I am checking to see if there are any strange translations in my local environment,
but I have come across a phenomenon that I don’t quite understand.
This is going to be a bit of a long story, but please bear with me.
The first image is GIMP 3.0.4 for Windows, downloaded from the official website.
The two areas circled in red are the UI for the Paths tool and the Histogram.
It has been translated into Japanese.
The second image is the gimp.master.ja.po file downloaded from the Japanese
translation team’s site and is currently being worked on.
The same parts are in the default language, English.
Test environment:
Windows 11 Home (24H2)
GIMP 3.0.4
Poedit 3.6.3 (7564) *Free version
Test 1:
I tried the same thing with French. The built-in French version of 3.0.4 is translated,
but if you add a compiled po file from the French team, it becomes English.
Verification 2:
I downloaded the pot file and tried compiling it with Japanese
only in the relevant part, but the result was the same.
Verification 3:
I tried converting it directly with msgfmt.exe without using Poedit,
but the result was the same.
I’ve only found these two so far, but there may be others.
If it was a bug in GIMP itself, it would probably be a problem elsewhere,
but I can’t find anything like that (although I wouldn’t recompile it if it’s already been fully translated).
I wonder if there’s a problem with Poedit, which I use for compiling.
I tested now in Swedish, and the strings show as translated for me as long as a new enough translation is provided. The strings changed trivially (added space or message context) in the last month.
All strings that show as untranslated for you are changed 2025-06-13 or later. Did you start the translation on an older po file than that? You can probably see this in the “POT-Creation-Date:” of your po file.
If this date is old, you can get an updated file by submitting your translation at Module Translation: gimp , then the statistics will automatically show if there are any fuzzy or untranslated strings against the current .pot file. This updated file can then be downloaded with the 開発版の変更とマージされた送信されたファイル link at the file that you submitted.
I also tested in Swedish. I downloaded the .po file from Module Translation: gimp, recompiled it using Poedit, and then overwrote the file in the LC_MESSAGES folder on my PC.
I’ve attached screenshots showing the results before and after. Some strings were replaced with English.
