Multilingual interface

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, Terry Vogelaar wrote:

> Who has bright ideas on how to handle multilingual projects?

I don't know if they're bright ideas, but here's what we did.

We used a single stack to display content, with all text content, button
labels, alerts, etc stored in external text files.  All the files were
grouped in folders by language, and were provided by the client's
translators.  The benefit of this arrangement was the client could edit
content as often as they wanted, and all we had to do was swap the new text
files with the old.  We could also give development versions of the stack to
the client, and they could edit text and see the results of the editing in
place, without having to know anything about MC.

The stack had a language selection screen presented at startup.  Selecting a
language simply told the stack which set of external content to use when
loading the content into fields on various cards.

Alert/error dialog messages were all stored in a single text file for each
language, and were read into a global variable at startup for easy access.

This setup seemed to work ok, especially since text translators were located
all over the place and had different schedules for turning around
translations.  It is a lot of external files to manage, but if there's going
to be a lot of editing taking place, external files are much easier to deal
with.

FWIW,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director

Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
Email: scott at tactilemedia.com
Web: www.tactilemedia.com