[Lazarus] Translations / Localizations for controls at design time

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2012-07-31 18:15, schrieb Graeme Geldenhuys:
 > In my opinion, your way is a terrible way to do localization! For
 > reasons as follows:
 > * No auto-detect of language when the application starts up.
Why is that not possible? If you can detect the language then you can also simply set the language variable to whatevery is needed and call the caption-routine that switches all captions to the selected language.


 > * When new languages are added, you must rebuild the whole application
 > (executable).
Yes. But why is this a drawback? It speeds up application start because all is in one exe file without having the need to load a separate language file on startup.


 > * You can't use any of the existing PO translating tools which have
 > some brilliant
 >    features like built-in dictionaries, suggested translations, spell
 > checking etc.
Well, I mostly find all these "brilliant" features more disturbing than helpful. And you also have a learning curve to investigate in these tools that eats up time.


 > * Quickly see a percentage of translation per language.
What do you mean? The number of languages that have been translated? Ok, this might be an issue in a very huge project with hundreds of developers.


 >> Sometimes
 >> translations are very crude because someone simply translates the text one
 >> by one like a google translator without knowing what it means and the
 >> outcome is often misleading.
 > That is why it is important to use good & clear resource string
 > constant names. The constant name alone (and maybe with the help of
 > existing translations) should make it clear in what context it is
 > used, thus helping the translator.
 >    rsDate = 'Some Date';
 >    rsTitle = 'Some dialog title';
 > vs
 >    rsAccountingTransactionDate = 'Some Date';
 >    rsCentreMaintenanceDialogTitle = 'Some dialog title';

Well, this reduces the probability of miss-translation but if you have the code nearby and maybe even comments then you have much more information of what is meant in this case.

Also, sometimes the length of the text is important too (so that a button caption can still be displayed and does not exceed the borders). If you only see a variable name then you don't know about these constraints.



Nevertheless, if lots of people are working on a large project an external file may be of use because the translator may neither be a programmer nor a program user (although in such cases translations are not very good IMO). But for smaller projects this is very convenient and saves cluttering information in too many files and has the mentioned advantages.