Darktable 5.6 appimage in Italian.

fabri66 · August 20, 2026, 1:14pm

Hi everyone, (sorry for the online translation of English), I downloaded Darktable 5.6 to use with Linux Mint 22.3, and I understand that it’s not possible to have the Italian translation (which is not included in the appimage package) because each time the program is used, a temporary folder is created, which then changes its name the next time it’s used, so it’s not possible to copy the file with the Italian translation. Is this correct?
Is the only alternative to installing the program in the .deb format provided by OBS? Thanks.

mino · August 20, 2026, 1:22pm

What leads you to this conclusion? Yes: The program data is mounted temporarily from the appimage. But the configuration, including the language-setting is persistent in the config directory (by default in your case ~/.config/darktable.

kmilos · August 20, 2026, 1:31pm

He’s not talking about his configuration nor settings, but the manually added translation catalogue file (<prefix>/share/locale/it/LC_MESSAGES/darktable.mo) that needs to exist within the app (or system) directory structure.

mino · August 20, 2026, 1:41pm

Oh my mistake!

I assumed italian translations were shipped by default. A somewhat hacky way to go about it would be to extract the AppImage with /path/to/darktable.AppImage --appimage-extract; adding the .mo and running the extracted binary from there (maybe wrapped in a .desktop for convenience).

manu · August 20, 2026, 1:45pm

Hi!

Not even! The Italian language is not in the OBS version either…

kmilos · August 20, 2026, 1:46pm

In every dt release translations that are not (90% I think?) complete get dropped, so every release has some non-deterministic subset of languages shipped. It’s a common surprise for users - some language was available in the previous release but is no longer present in the current one when they upgrade, and vice-versa…

The point of OBS .deb was that the path is fixed once installed, so adding the translation manually is an easy, one-time operation.

manu · August 20, 2026, 2:05pm

Can someone confirm these paragraphs are still the actual explanation for translating dt UI?

github.com/darktable-org/darktable

doc/TRANSLATORS.md

master

[wiki](https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/wiki/Translations)
# Introduction

darktable's user interface can be translated into many languages. 

In short, to support a translation, the build process needs a xx.po file with the two-letter language code, e.g. fr.po.

To make sure your translation makes it into an official build:
- subscribe to the relevant [mailing list](https://www.darktable.org/contact/)
- ensure you keep your translation up to date to avoid large work just before the release
- entry criteria:
  - no more than 20 untranslated strings 
  - no more than 50 fuzzy strings 

## How darktable uses the .po files

The application uses gettext engine for translation, and it works like this, a text based editable PO file contains a number of sequences containing: 
- a line in English (source language)
- a line in target language, and 
- a reference to a line in source code where original text in English comes from.

This file has been truncated. show original

fabri66 · August 20, 2026, 2:07pm

@manu @kmilos @mino Thanks everyone, now everything is clear, so I’ll install the .deb version to have a reference folder for the language configuration files, where I’ll copy the Italian configuration file (an operation I’ve already done with previous versions of Darktable).
Thanks again for the support! See you soon!

N.B.: I’ve been following this fantastic forum for years, but I don’t speak English, and this has always held me back. Now that online translation tools are increasingly more accurate, I think I’ll have no more problems communicating with you all.

mino · August 20, 2026, 2:32pm

afaik the instructions are still accurate. PR against the .po is happening regularily. Just the part about the mailing list seems out of date.