On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 Richard Herz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(snip)
> So I learned: Whenever I start any new project, I am going to design the
> project to make translation and language localization easy.
>
> Jacqueline suggested putting text in the custom properties of each object,
> answer text in the custom props of a button, for example. Adding a new
> language then would mean accessing all the individual objects. Maybe put
> the text strings at the stack (or higher level), e.g., in a custom property
> set of the stack whose keys are formed from the name of the object using the
> string plus a string number (or other identifier) for objects using multiple
> strings...
Unfortunately another common requirement for large multilanguage
products like this is that the actual translation must be done by
people who only use word processors. The above architecture is
efficient and will work fine if you're willing to reimport all of the
text each time any of it changes. I've also seen projects that store
the text for each object in a separate file in a language-specific
directory that's opened and read in as a card is opened. That way you
just hand the whole directory structure over to the translator and
they just go through the files one at a time. This architecture is
also pretty much a requirement if your product relies on a lot of text
in images (importing lots of images is something you have to be
careful about even in single-language products, and with multiple
languages it pretty much becomes a necessity).
Of course you could combine the two approaches and instead of loading
the text at run time you write a script that goes through the whole
stack and loads all of the text at once. Then you just have to push a
button when you get a new translation.
Regards,
Scott
> Rich Herz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
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