This , of course, is a subject I'm sure is not generally approached without a hell of a lot of forethought. Unfortunately, I may have to do just that.

I have a major distributed application that may have to be translated into French. I have had experience with this sort of thing in the past (using Foxpro 2.0 - DOS) and it was, in general, an absolute nightmare. The technique I used was to write a program that searched the code for character strings used in prompts , captions, messages etc. When found, the string was replaced in the code with a unique ID and the string (and ID) was written to a textfile which was then sent off for translating. When the translated file returned the opposite action was performed. The translated strings were "stuffed" back into the code. I'm sure all the shortcomings of this approach should be obvious and don't need reiterating.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of problem. If so, I'd appreciate hearing about possible methodologies and any associated drawbacks.

Thanks in advance ..