Localizing strings using Qt which are declared in Global Scope

Question

I'm developing Qt UI application and localizing the UI strings. In my application, I'm using QLabel and setting the texts dynamically. I experimented two ways of setting the texts for localization. While executing the application, I could see, in my first approach strings are getting localized but in second approach they are not.

//Approach 1:
//ui.cpp
//Directly hardcoding the values
labelBox1->setText(QApplication::translate("context","test string"));

//Approach 2:
//UI_Consts.h
static const QString str = QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP("Context","Test String");
//variable 'str' is in global scope

//ui.cpp
#include "UI_Consts.h"
...
labelBox1->setText(str);

When I debugged why second approach not worked, I found that global variables are initialized before the execution of main function. We generally write code for Translation in main() and hence those global variables are not getting translated. I prefer second approach as we can list down all the UI strings in a single file and easily maintain them. I want to know is there any way to localize the strings which are declared in Global Scope(like used in my second approach)?

Answer 1

Well, that's not the way Qt's translation system is meant to be used...

But if you want to do it that way you could write a function (or implement a class/struct holding all strings) that initializes all your string variables after loading the translations in main() - of course this would result in even more code :D

Answer 2

I think you've misunderstood what for is QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP. In the Qt Linguist Manual: Programmers you can read under the section: Using QT_TR_NOOP() and QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP()

If you need to have translatable text completely outside a function, there are two macros to help: QT_TR_NOOP() and QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP(). These macros merely mark the text for extraction by lupdate. The macros expand to just the text (without the context).

So, the problem isn't the global variable str.