Shoutbox

It would be nice if somebody could create a class that can handle scripts in multi languages in a good and easy way.

The problem I see now is: Somebody releases a nice script in English and it gets added to the download DB. A few days later somebody downloads the English version, translates it to Spanish, and submits a new .plsc file... same script but this time in Spanish. What I do now is mail back the creator of the Spanish version and tell him to contact the original (English version) creator so he can make a new version that is multi-language. Because having 2 separate scripts for 2 languages only makes things harder for updates.

However, It looks like things like this will happen more and more often, and it can be hard for some coders to turn their script multi-language. So I was hoping someone could write a class which makes this stuff easier for them.

Something that works with languagefiles (similar to Plus! itself) would be nice. Would be great if this class takes care of loading and reading from the language files, and a menu so users can change language. All that coders would have left to do is replace all their text strings and reference it to the language class.

Would like to hear ideas from people, and those who would want to make this. Saw somebody talk about it in another topic, but don't recall which one or who it was. But everyone is welcome to create it .

I think that if the script developer is serious about translations, they'd have thought of a solution long before getting to the submission stage. But still, it's a good idea, especially if it's a 'drop-in' class that any developer can use.

Or maybe Google has something.

I already thought about this, and I even thought about making a class that can also acces the MP!L language strings and the WLM language strings. So you would be able to grab the basic strings like "Nickname", "Yes", "No", "Sign off" etc directly from WLM / MP!L. In that way those words will always appear in the users language, without having to translate it yourselves.

It would of course bring new problems, for example about design, and scripts in half english / half otherlanguage, but I think it can still be usefull...

Hmmm, good idea. I'm starting to work on this and I like your idea too, J-Thread

This would be easy enough for strings used in the jscript files, but what about the captions stored in interface xmls???

Yeah, I was just thinking about that. You'd have to use SetControlText to change the controls' text to something in the file...

Is there a way to include variables in XML. Perhaps if all the variables were defined during the start of the file, or even in a seperate file then somehow imported, it would make translations much easier.

It's pretty much done. Tomorrow I'll be squashing some bugs and testing it more thoroughly, maybe writing a tiny bit of documentation ...it's small though. It is very simple to use, and relies on external files. It has a function to open windows too, and automatically translates those, based on another file telling what controls to translate ...

great news deAd ^^ If this works correctly it will be really usefull for us !

It works very well. You can insert comments in the text files too, so they don't get super-confusing to edit ...