OpenEuphoria

RE: international language support

• Posted by freeplay at mailandnews.com Aug 16, 2001
• 1003 views

>===== Original Message From brian_keene at yahoo.com =====
<snip>
>1. You may be able to translate the keywords, but all error messages
>   are still going to be in English.  So the user must still know
>   English to develop the program.
<snip>

Hi Brian,

This is an easy one to do and has been done in many applications (a compiler 
is really just an application yes?).  UNIX has had NLS (Natural Language 
Support) for ages now.  The idea for program dialogue (prompts, error 
messages, report names, column titles etc.) is that you write message 
catalogues with all this information.  You write one for each language you 
want to support.  When the program runs it detects which language to run in 
(UNIX uses the LANG environment variable for this) and then consults the 
appropriate message catalogue.

The programmer has more work to do (on top of writing the message catalogue) 
because they have to consult the message catalogue (through an API I guess) to 
get message text as opposed to hard coding it into printf statements and the 
like.  Issues such as message lengths differing from language to language have 
to be addressed.  It can get quite complex to say the least.

Regards,

FP.