>Hi,
>
>I am sure this is an old question. And I think I know the answer. But here it is. I have an opportunity to sell my product in a Spanish market. My current language affiliation is American English. What do I need to do? Do I have to create a new project with the new forms and data in it using the correct code pages? Or can I somehow share the project thereby not reproducing my work?
>
>Thank you,
>Mike
I got the same problem some months ago. My applications are bilingual (In my case English/French) and can be multilingual. Here is what I did:
- For the build in bilingual, I just create my forms caption (reports also) using a global variable to know what is the current language. So for example, the caption "Company:" in the forms will be something like =iif(m0frch,"Compagnie","Company"). That is working very fine but the drawbacks are that the programmer must know both language (because you don't want a no-programmer to go in your code) and that adding a 3rd language would not be an easy task.
- For additionnal language, I did a little "translation tools bar" that the power user can use to translate himself the forms and the menus. I did not have time to take care of the reports, so I just let them do a modify report.
1) For the translation of the forms, I created a translation table that contains all the translated captions. The key is something like program-language-caption's name. In my "translation tools bar", I have a button that grab all the content of the current forms (basically, it browse into all objects of the form) and put it in a grid where the user can do his translation and save it in the desired language. In the user's table, the language of each user is indicated so when he logs in, if he is in another language the the build-in english or french, the init of the forms replace all object's caption with the ones saved in the translation database. Well...it works! Even in russian with cyrilic alphabet.
2) For the translation of the menus, I created a table that is used by the system to dynamically create a menu. So basically, this table is driven by language and the user can alter it for translation.
For the code page, well...I did nothing. I don't know. I should probably have pay attention but so far, I had no problem regarding this issue and I did nothing.
Hope it helps. If you need exemples, including source code, don't hesitate to send me an email to eric@vivasoft.qc.ca

Eric