Multilingual dialogues

[David Bovill]

Just started work on setting up a generic way to provide multilingual  
dialogues in Rev. Lots of you have done this before... so from  
memeory the important things are:

     1) use external text files so that translators can easily use an  
editor to do their work
     2) Ask the translators to use TextEdit or the equivalent - not word

     3) Use an appropriate encoding... anything wrong with UTF8. I  
need English, German, and Eastern European languages for now....

Now in the circle I am in a lot of the translators are also  
programmers. So:

     a) Against the previous advice a Rev interface for the  
translators is tempting.

     b) I also have an outliner which can either use XML (UTF8) or  
separate text files. This would mean I could use a single XML file  
for each dialogue encoded in UTF8 - with the option of exporting as  
plain text files.

     c) The detailed issues regarding exporting from UTF8 to plain  
text in a way in which it can be edited by a plain text editor are  
new territory for me.

Structurally I am thinking of associating each dialogue with a unique  
object (usually the object that calls the dialog = the target) and  
being able to call / reuse the same dialogue from another object  
using a custom property .- something like:

     - put the answer_Dialogue["German"] of btn "Question" into  
someAnswer

Anyone have any advice or code to simplify this?