Qt is a powerful portable development environment.
Qt applications are easily translatable. Developers typically write their
applications in English but all strings which are visible to the end-user
can be automatically grabbed and stored in translation files with
suffix .ts. See more details here.
The translation files are then passed to various translators who are fluent in the target languages. Using a user-friendly tool, Qt Linguist, the translators produce the translations from the English strings in their native language.
The tool Qt Linguist is installed with the complete Qt development environment. The binary installer for this environment is 1 GB big and a typical installation uses 4 GB of disk space.
This is acceptable for developers. But translators are not developers. They may even have no technical skill at all. The only tool they need from the rich Qt environment is Linguist. Asking them to download and install 1 GB of Qt SDK is not acceptable for most of them.
So, having a solution to download and install Qt Linguist only is a legitimate requirement for translators.
Since such installers are real requirements, custom binary installers for Qt Linguist are available from many third-party download sites. However, there is a security issue here. We have no guarantee that the application they install is genuine and free of malware.
This issue was partially addressed by the Qt project which proposes a standalone Windows installer for older versions of Qt Linguist here.
qtlinguist-installersThe purpose of this project is to provide Open Source scripts to rebuild standalone binary installers for Qt Linguist from a standard installation of the Qt environment.
This solves the security issue for technical companies or independent developers who develop Qt software and delegate the internationalization of their applications to non-technical translators. The technical developer can thus create his own binary installers for Qt Linguist using his own trustable environment and later deliver these installers to the translators.
Alternatively, if you trust the author of this project, you may directly download binary installers from the project releases.
As an example, a standalone binary installer for Qt Linguist on Windows is 17 MB big and uses 33 MB of disk space after installation. Compare this to 1 GB of installer and 4 GB of disk space for the complete Qt environment.
This project provides installers for Windows and Mac OS, the two main working environments for non-technical translators.
Most Linux distros provide a segmented installation of the Qt environment, many small packages with dependency management, instead of a huge global Qt installer. In this context, installing Qt Linguist only is probably already available.
When the qtlinguist-installers project was created, the Qt project did not provide any
standalone installer for Qt Linguist. Since then, a Windows installer is
available here.
This new situation make the qtlinguist-installers project less necessary.
The scripts in this project will remain available but no new binary package
will be provided in the Releases area of this project.