Search
As of October, 2016, Embarcadero is offering a free release
of Delphi (Delphi
10.1 Berlin Starter Edition ). There
are a few restrictions, but it is a welcome step toward making
more programmers aware of the joys of Delphi. They do say
"Offer may be withdrawn at any time", so don't delay if you want
to check it out. Please use the
feedback link to let
me know if the link stops working.
Support DFF - Shop
If you shop at Amazon anyway, consider
using this link.
We receive a few cents from each
purchase. Thanks
Support DFF - Donate
If you benefit from the website, in terms of
knowledge, entertainment value, or something otherwise useful,
consider making a donation via PayPal to help defray the
costs. (No PayPal account necessary to donate via credit
card.) Transaction is secure.
Mensa®
Daily Puzzlers
For over 15 years
Mensa Page-A-Day calendars have provided several puzzles a year
for my programming pleasure. Coding "solvers" is most fun,
but many programs also allow user solving, convenient for "fill
in the blanks" type. Below are Amazon links to the
two most recent years.
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2017
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2018
(Hint: If you can
wait, current year calendars are usually on sale in January.)
Contact
Feedback:
Send an
e-mail with your comments about this program (or anything else).
|
| |
Problem Description
A "Hello World" program to examine techniques and pitfalls in "Internationaliziing"
a program to support foreign languages.
Background & Techniques
A while ago I had the chance to convert a program to support an Italian
non-profit organization intending to use my Reaction Times program with non
English-speaking young people. There are some good, free, tools but
it took a few days of study to pick up on how to use them for even the simplest
case with a single language. l decided to write a "do-nothing" program so I
could concentrate on how to generalize it to handle multiple languages.
The free tools I used are
dxGetText, a translation toolkit for Delphi and
PoEdit, which
helps enter translations for strings extracted from your program by
dxGetText.
Both programs are also available from
SourceForge.net.
I'll outline the program first and then provide some notes about the use of
the above tools used to implement it. The program displays one of two
messages: "Hello World!" or "Goodbye!" toggled by a "Change
message"
button. A radio group allows choice of several languages (currently
English,
French,
German,
Spanish, and "Southern
USA" just for fun).
The messages and all of the displayed text (titles, labels, and radio group
contents) are displayed in the chosen language. The language choices
in the radio group are built dynamically, so additional languages could be added
simply by adding translation sets (.po and
.mo files) for other languages in the
defined location ("locale/xx/Lc_messages" folder
within the folder containing the
source code and recompiling the program. "xx" in the previous folder
structure is the two letter id code for the language ( "fr", "de", and "es" for
the initial set). These language id's and the languages names are defined in
ISO Standard
639.1.
I have not tested the program with a "locale"
language other than English. In fact, I'm not even sure how to do that.
It should recognize and honor the other three languages but I'm sure
someone will let me know the symptoms when it doesn't work!
Here are some notes about elements of multi-language support as implemented
here:
- Uses
Dxgettext GNU freeware to translate and
PoEdit freeware to define string
translations in
default.po files (one file per language,
each in its own folder)
- Add
gnuGetText unit to Uses clauses.
- Add
gettext('xxx') to translate all 'xxx' constant strings. Use
_('xxx') as a
shortcut alias for
gettext.
- Install
DXGettext to add
the "template" building option to the folder context menu.
It will
scan
.pas, .dfm, .dpr, .res files in that folder to build "default.po" file of
most strings found within those files.
- Define folders for translations within the project folder: default folder
names "project/locale/xx/LC_Messages/"
where 'xx' is the two
letter language id.
- Copy
default.po from
Step 4 to each specific language folder defined in Step 5. (After the
initial run, use the "merge" option, see Step 9.)
- Run
poEdit on the
Step 6 file to manually translate strings. Double click
.po
file to start
poEdit. To avoid error message, under "catalog/settings/projects"
tab, define a project/version name. Select a string in upper window, enter
translation in window at the bottom of the form. Make sure "Windows" line
separator option is checked under "File/ Preferences/Editor" and you will be
able fine tune editing with
Notepad.
- Closing
PoEdit will create
.mo
file used at run-time.
- To avoid reentering translations after program changes are made, a new .po
file can be merged with old by right click old .po file and selecting "Merge"
option.
-
poEdit doesn't allow deletions of strings as far as I could tell, so I
used
Notepad for that kind of cleanup.
Strings which no longer appear in the source code files are converted to
comments in the .po
file when a new template is merged, but text in forms remain. If
it is always overwritten by the program entris for the forms text tmay be
deleted using Notepad. Right click .po file and select "Create .mo
file" after editing with
Notepad. (poEdit will automatically rebuild .mo file
when closing). If rebuilding .mo returns an error, rerun
poEdit for detail error
and
fix-up.
- Finally, when ready to distribute the program, right click
"Embed translations" on the context menu for the
executable in order to embed the
.mo
translation files into that file.
One more note, the dxGettext manual has sample code which retrieves
the two letter codes for the target languages included with a program, but
I could not find a clean way to convert the two letter ISO639.1 codes to
language names, so i made one. File ISO639V1.txt included in the
downloads has the 200 or so codes and names defined by the standard. I
load that file into a string list, LanguageTable, and use it to display
the names of the languages found.
Running/Exploring the Program
Suggestions for Further Explorations
 |
I'm sure that the ISO638V1.txt file could be
incorporated as a resource into the executable, but I on't have time to work
on it right now. Sounds like a candidate for another demo program! |
| Original: July 17, 2011 |
Modified:
May 15, 2018
|
|
