Multi-Language Software : MultiLangVsNet

Multi Language Software

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Multi-Language Add-In for Visual Studio

General Description

The Multi-Language Add-In provides extended support for creating localized applications using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The supported application types are

Windows Forms
WPF
ASP.NET 2.0
Compact Framework
MFC (unmanaged C++)

The product is an Add-In for Visual Studio, which means that it is tightly integrated into the development environment itself. The localization support is based on the built in localization support in Visual Studio and in the .NET environment.

The basic steps involved in localizing an application are:

Identifying the strings to be translated

The Add-In scans your project, looking for strings defined in

The properties of controls	For .NET controls, the properties which can be translated are marked with the Localizable attribute. The Add-In shows all string properties with the Localizable attribute. For ASP.NET projects, it also shows static text from the HTML code. For MFC projects (unmanaged C++) the Add-In shows the texts in dialog and menu resources defined in the resource script (.rc) file.
The program source code	The Add-In shows all texts detected in the source code.

In both cases, you can

select the texts which you wish to translate
hide texts which you do not wish to translate

Note
Most programs contain a lot of text strings which do not require translation. In many cases, translating a string will actually cause a program error. Selecting the texts which require translation is a job which can only be performed by the programmer.

The Multi-Language Add-In makes it easy to start this job late in project development.

Specifying the languages to be supported

The Add-In shows you a list of all languages supported by Windows. Simply select a language from the list to add it to the project.

For each language, an additional column is added to the grids, showing the strings for this language.

Entering translations

There are two basic ways to enter translations. The one you choose probably depends on who is going to do the translation work.

Enter translations directly	The simplest way to enter a translation is to type it into the grid. When you click in a cell, the Add-In will immediately show the location of the text in the source code, or in a designer window. This makes it easy to identify where and how the text is used. The Add-In contains a database of common translations, so terms such as OK and Cancel will usually be translated automatically. The Add-In also contains a translation memory feature, which shows you translations of other texts containing the same words. This is the best approach, if the programmer is able to translate the texts herself or himself.
Enter translations with Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice	In most cases, you will need to send the texts to a translator. In this case, you can - export the texts to a spreadsheet file - have the texts translated in the spreadsheet - import the translated texts back into the project from the spreadsheet

Storing translations and adding runtime support

After entering translations using the Add-In, the texts are exported to resource files in the .ResX format, used by Visual Studio. The standard localization support in the .NET runtime environment will load the localized texts for the default system language.

Using the Add-In you can add additional support for

selecting the language from a list when the program is started
changing the language when the program is running

For unmanaged C++ projects, the Add-In exports translations to the resource script (.rc) file in three steps:

all texts are exported to string table resources
the texts in existing dialog and menu resources are updated
if necessary, new dialog and menu resources are generated for individual languages.