Translating Mizu

Every word Mizu shows comes from a language file. English is built in; every other language is one plain text file that anyone can write.

Adding a language

Take lang/en.txt and save it as <code>.txt, where the code is the two-letter ISO 639-1 code of your language: pl.txt for Polish, de.txt for German.

Change the header:

name = Polski             # the language in its own words, for the picker
english_name = Polish
timezone = 60             # minutes east of UTC; Setup suggests this zone

Translate the text after each =. Keep every key as it is.
Run tools/mklang.py. It lists, for every file, how much is done, keys it does not know, and placeholders that went wrong.
Send the file as a pull request or a patch.

To try it before that, put the file into Z:\MIZU\LANG\ with an upper-case name (PL.TXT) and choose the language in Control Panel.

Rules

The file is UTF-8. Mizu draws European Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; right-to-left scripts and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not supported yet.
\n starts a new line; \\ is one backslash. Lines starting with # are comments.
Keep every %d and %s, in the same order. A phrase whose placeholders differ from the English is shown in English rather than shown wrong.
A phrase you leave out, or leave empty, is shown in English, so a half-done file already works.
weekday_0 to weekday_6 are two-letter day names from Sunday; day_name_0 to day_name_6 the whole ones. month_1 to month_12 are months as they stand in a date ("3 March"; in Czech and Russian the genitive), and month_name_1 to month_name_12 as they stand alone ("March 2026").

After an update

New phrases appear in en.txt when tools/mklang.py is run. tools/mklang.py --fill adds the ones your file lacks to its end, as commented English lines, ready to translate.

Keyboard layouts

Layouts live in the kernel (kernel/layout.c). If your language needs one Mizu does not have, open an issue with a picture or a description of the keyboard. When its code matches the language code, it becomes the second layout after English for anyone who installs Mizu in that language, as Czech QWERTZ does.

Writing a program →