Multilingual UI

[Graham Samuel]

I very much like Kee's approach, though there is an issue about populating the list of texts for the elements. I was involved in a project (which in fact was never finished) where we had to get all our texts translated from English into a language we (the developers) didn't know, Welsh. So we sent out a simple text document to a native Welsh speaker, with each text on a separate line, and got back a line-by-liine translation. In order to make it less tedious to then place each text into its appropriate custom property 'by hand', so to speak, our equivalent of the "loadLanguage" command for each text simply loaded the text for the element from the appropriate line of the text file for the particular language. So each text element (button etc) had a built-in identifying number which corresponded to the appropriate line number in the list of texts. This approach would have also made it very easy to add new languages. It was obviously an easy job to add such text files either externally at run time or internally during the development process.

Graham



> On 18 Jan 2015, at 06:07, kee nethery <kee at kagi.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 17, 2015, at 1:54 PM, Ethan Lish <ethanlish at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Is there a defined approach, tool or general guidance on how best to design & develop a livecode app to support a multilingual user interface. 
> 
> My approach was, for each text element (button, field), to create a custom property named for the language “en”, “fr”, “de”, and then put the translations into the custom properties. On opencard I would send a “loadlanguage" command (that I wrote, you can call yours whatever) to each element and populated the element with the appropriate translation. In the corner of each window I had a language selector and if the language was changed, I’d send opencard which would send loadlanguage to each element.
> 
> If the language custom property was missing for that language, and there was a “en” custom property, I’d use that. Also, if there was an “en” property, I’d create the other properties and populate them with the english translation. If there was no “en” custom property, I’d not alter what was being displayed by the element.
> 
> I found it useful to create a command that set the language to “ww” and then for each card, I’d measure the length of each translation and insert the longest translation regardless of language. I could then adjust the buttons and fields appropriately knowing they would work properly regardless which language was selected.
> 
> That is what I came up with when I was playing with a multi-lingual Livecode project. Seemed to work pretty well.
> 
> Kee Nethery
> 
> 
> 
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