> The fact that Legacy has been working, as you affirm, "for > years" on an international version gives me the opposite > impression.: that they are not really devoting as much time > to it as you might think; or else, incorporating foreign > languages is proving to be a daunting task.
Speaking as a professional software engineer, and one who has worked specifically on multi-language software packages, adding multi-language support is NOT as 'easy' as Mr. Ferguson would like to believe. Because of the fact that you're dealing with words of different lengths, different grammatical structures, different reading directions (and sometimes combinations of reading directions), different numerical and date conventions, different grid control orders and operations, and a host of other issues, essentially every piece of display-related code has to be designed and written specifically to support multi-language capability. Every dialog box that appears on the screen must be rewritten to be able to reconfigure itself for the varying requirements and layouts of different languages. Every report and output must be rewritten to pull every single word from a language-specific resource file; you can't leave any string literals at all anywhere. Same for web pages; every generation routine have to be able to tailor itself to the widely varying requirements of each different language. You also need a rules-based grammatical engine to make sure that the reports and web pages follow the grammar rules for the current language. Then there has to be a development, testing, and distribution mechanism for the specific language customization files. In the case of a product like Legacy, where many wording files are user-customizable, you also have to have a translation mechanism with a full dictionary to handle the user fields. It's an extremely large investment of time and money for an extremely small market segment; companies very often spend tens of millions of dollars - or more - on multilingual support. It's by no means a 'simple matter' of doing a translation of the program into each of the target languages, and even if it were it would instantly produce a MASSIVE version control problem, with each bug fix and each enhancement having to be applied to and tested separately on EACH language version. This isn't a matter of adding a few bells, whistles, and gongs, as Version 6 was. This would be a massive ground-up redesign that would probably take a senior development team several years, during which time all other work would have to come to a halt, if not for resource reasons then because it wouldn't make sense to keep investing in a codebase that was being depracated. Given that there's probably very little interest in genealogy outside of North America and Western Europe, Legacy probably feels that it'd be a massive money-loser. > think that Legacy would fill a big gap here, especially with the > rapidly-growing number of Spanish Americans. At least it could expand > "Customize" to give us more bi-lingual control. But how many of the ones who don't or won't speak English are going to be interested in genealogy? That cuts your potential market down pretty far. Glen Legacy User Group Etiquette guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp
