A reasonable place to start is the Microsoft MSDN website.
You can search it from here
http://search.microsoft.com/us/dev/default.asp
This kind of translation is known as "localization" (usually
with a 'z') and searching MSDN on this keyword will get you a lot
of material.
If you are translating a program that has menus and messages
(and control captions etc etc) in resources your task is much
simplified.
But often you will find programs that were not written with
localization in mind will have text embedded in the sourcecode
and this can be a big problem for you. Sometimes (often) it
is worth some careful thought and perhaps some re-writing to
add multiple language support into the application in a systematic
way.
Something else you need to be aware of is that if your target
language uses 16-bit "wide" characters (Chinese does) you need
to look carefully at the mechanisms in the program for handling
message strings and buffering them because probably they are
set up for 8-bit characters.
Also - you usually need to worry about more than just translating
menus and messages. You may need to be able to accept input
in your local language. This means reading "wide" strings from
text controls and saving them into databases. You have to be
careful about buffer sizes, string library calls, sorting,
comparing and stuff like that because all of these operations
will need to be "aware" they are operating on wide strings.
We've run into some of these problems (because we're in Thailand)
but Thai script doesn't require wide charactersets so we haven't
had to worry about most of the unicode issues.
There is a company http://www.lingscape.com/ that makes some
Delphi tools for multi language applications that you may want
to investigate. I have never used their product - and my
impression is that it is a more a tool for developing
multi-language applications (rather than converting them).
I hope this is enough to get you started.
(You have a fun job ahead of you :-) )
-ns
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hannah Wang" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Multiple recipients of list delphi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 9:16 AM
Subject: [DUG]: Foreign Language conversion.
> Hello All,
>
> I'm doing some research on the Foreign Language conversion and want to
> convert all the menus, etc from English to a foreign language script
saying
> like Chinese.
> Since I'm relative new in this area, It'll be very appreciated if anyone
> could show me the direction. Any suggestions on where I could find useful
> information would be great as well.
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> kind regards.
>
> Hannah
>
>
> Hannah Wang
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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