An effective way to Localize my Revolution Projects for Multiple Languages

[Lynn Fredricks]

> > - Placing all text in a file, and then just translating the file to 
> > multiple languages when building the standalone would be preferred, 
> > but that would require some massive scripting to populate 
> button and 
> > field labels, etc.
> > ...
> > Any ideas? ... Please!
> 
> I've used the above technique in the past.  I used a minimal 
> numeric tag system where each control label in the app 
> referenced an ID in an external text file: <1001>xyz 
> text</1001> at startup.  You could use a named tag as
> well: <welcome>Willkommen</welcome>.

Scott's method resembles "classical" style translation methods (I say
classical because its what I did when I used to have a localization business
in the early '90s) and it works well. Get a unique numeric identifier, then
orchestrate a "string swap". Apple's old Appleglot tool was pretty good at
that.

The one downside to almost any method is that you still have to go through
and look at your interface to make sure what you've swapped fits. Text
expansion can increase your strings by 20-50%.

Its best if you can come up with a clean text file that you can hand to a
translator without having to give them your application, then let them
eyeball the finished product so that it makes sense within the application.

I strongly recommend avoiding pure machine translation. Even the best MT
makes for poor reading.

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
Worldwide Business Operations
Runtime Revolution Ltd
http://www.runrev.com