Re: Multilingual Support

ab034@torfree.net (Dusan Petrovic) wrote: :My organization is the biggest courier company in Canada and is moving :from MF world to C/S. HP, Entera and Informix OnLine DSA 7.2 are :ocomponents our backend is compsed of. MS Developers Studio/VC++ :,Rational Rose and Erwin are our developmet tools. One of features that :must be delivered is Multilingual support for all applications. The :only question is how? If anyone has good ideas and willing to :share those with me please replay by mail. :My e-mail address: :Dusan_Petrovic@purolator.com :-- You use the GLS support in the engine to be able to enter multilingual data of course. This doesn't help your application much. Microsoft's idea of multilingual support is to put all strings (to be displayed, printed or otherwise used where multiple languages matters) into resource files. We find this too limiting, as maintenance and translation becomes a mess. We prefer to put such strings in a simple sequential file. We code them with fixed length keys at the start of each line containing the language, a text code and a sequence number for strings that needs to be split in multiple parts. We simply read this into the application (in an array, linked list or another structure) and use the string via simple access functions. We do this in Informix 4GL and Visual Basic, but it will work at least as well in C++. In this way we can keep multiple languages in the same file. Translation becomes easy with any editor, and any user can select any language at any time without problems. We have of course written some small helper functions, but they are all in Informix 4GL so they would probably not be to helpfull for you. They are simple though - a small one to enter strings, and another to compare to files and print out the differences and generate a new file as a starting point for translation of newly entered strings. May be it will work for you as well. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org