[Gambas-user] Some questions about project Translation

[RICHARD WALKER]

On 23/09/2012, Sebastian Kulesz <sebikul at ...626...> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:08 PM, RICHARD WALKER
> <richard.j.walker at ...247...> wrote:
>> So I was wondering, does it make sense to re-code a project so that
>> strings, or string constants are used for repeated fragments of text?
>> Might such an approach actually make it harder to translate
>> "sentences" made of these fragments into some languages?
>
> Normally, you should avoid this. If you have string like:
>
> Are you sure you want to $action this?
>
> $action being move, delete, copy, etc. You should keep the repeated
> strings. Different languages have different syntactic order, having a
> generic string can be really hard to translate if there is a specific
> language that uses a different order for different possible $actions.
>

Good point, Sebastian. I had suspected this to be the case. If I have
coded with string constants or variables for ease of maintenance, how
would I get the plain text versions of the built strings into the
translation file? Is it just a matter of enclosing the concatenation
of String/Const and text in parentheses?

>> And finally, in examining my code for translatable strings I realised
>> that I had made extensive and vital use of text written by various
>> shell commands and captured for analysis/action in various Process
>> Read and Error handlers. That started me wondering how to handle this
>> situation in another language where the text written by these
>> processes would likely be very different from what I was expecting.
>> Any ideas?
>
> The best solution would be to force the use of the English language by
> setting the environmental variable LANGUAGE.
>
> You can do that like this:
> Shell "LANGUAGE=en firefox" to sOutput
>
> If you want this to persist, you can create a virtual terminal inside
> a process instance and execute (i did not test this, but it should
> work) before any other command:
> Print #hProcess, "export LANGUAGE=en"
>
> Hope this helps you!
>

That looks like a very workable solution. The various processes'
console output will only ever be seen by the Gambas project running
them, so it makes sense to force a particular expected language rather
than leave it to chance and LOCALE. I will try that later this
evening.

Richard