Translator or Localizer?


Before you engage the services of a translator or localizer, you should be sure what role you expect this person to play. A translator simply translates all the text in the application. A localizer also does this but has a wider scope. A localizer considers the size and position of controls, the assignments of hotkeys, the use of images and colors, the assignment of right-to-left properties and IME modes, and the correctness of globalization; in general, a localizer has an understanding of the appropriateness of the resulting application in the chosen culture. The choice between these roles is dependent, to a large extent, on the technology you have used to build your application. For example, if you have written a Windows Forms 1.1 application, the controls' positions (and, to some extent, their sizes) are most likely fixed. In this scenario, you might want to give the translator/localizer the opportunity to move and resize controls for a given culture. If, however, you have written a Windows Forms 2.0 application and used TableLayoutPanels and FlowLayoutPanels, the positioning and sizing of the controls will probably already be handled by the .NET Framework, and such changes would be unwanted. Similarly, an ASP.NET application might rely on the essential nature of HTML for positioning and sizing, and again such changes to positions and sizes would be unwanted. You need to make similar decisions on issues such as hotkey assignments, fonts, right-to-left settings and IME modes, to determine whether these are handled within the application logic (and, therefore, by developers) or within resources (and, therefore, by a localizer). With these decisions in place, you are better able to give your translator/localizer an accurate scope of his or her role.

Your decision on the translator/localizer's role might have an impact on how you process the resources when they return. If the translator/localizer's role is solely one of translation, your reintegration process will only reintegrate text strings into the master copy. All other resources (e.g., colors, Size, Location, Font, RightToLeft, ImeMode) will be ignored. In this scenario, your translation/localization tool should disable or hide these resources to avoid unnecessary frustration on your translator's part. Unfortunately, this is not possible if you use the Windows Forms Resource Editor (WinRes.exe) because it does not support customization. This lends more weight to the argument to write your own WinRes.




.NET Internationalization(c) The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications
.NET Internationalization: The Developers Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications
ISBN: 0321341384
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 213

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