BlackBox Framework Center

Hmm,
If I only use English why should I also have strings for all the other languages?

I think having the Center maintain the directories is the right thing to do.

Alternatively, we might consider having our BB download spit into the different
language versions, i.e. download Russian version, download German version, ...

-Doug

The Russian group (oberoncore) already have a Russian-language version of Blackbox don't they? (Including documentation and a support forum as far as i can tell).

The idea is not provide multilingual documentation now, but provide multilingual menus and forms. This will not increase much the size of BlackBox, but will show how easy to make multilingual apps with BlackBox.

The center should only provide the infrastructure for supporting multiple languages.
It should not, at least not from the beginning, support any translation to another language.
Imagine how tedious it is for a language translator to run through the center's voting process
for even the smallest change in the wording.

In addition, there are many languages in the world and we can certainly not
support all of them. So why should we make an exception for one specific language translation?

As a general approach, a language translation should be a separate and incremental download that can
be installed by simply copying the directory structure to the BlackBox installation.
Very much like any of the other CPC packages.

We can of course use the russian language translation for testing the infrastructure
for multiple language support provided by the center. But this does not mean that we
take over responsibility for this language translation.

- Josef

I see many voices against including translations and understands all the reasons.

I have just thought about the alternative solution. I can make BlackBox automatically download translation files from the web. There will be minimalistic languages manager. Languages will be hosted in GitHub and tables of URLs in our web-site. Translations will be updated by native speakers editors without voting and Center will not take responsibility for the quality of the translation. In a rare conflict can be one language from two editors.

jumping into the discussion lately ...

Ivan, I think your last approach is quite reasonable, but you should also provide instructions for manually dowloading and installing the required files for "offline" systems.

I am not sure if I remember the multi language support correct, but I remember that there were subdirectories in the doc dirs created for different languages. I guess it might be a solution to have a similar structure for rsrc dirs.
--
Bernhard

bernhard wrote:..., but I remember that there were subdirectories in the doc dirs created for different languages. I guess it might be a solution to have a similar structure for rsrc dirs.

This already exists.

The drawing package Escher (on CPC) makes extensive use of the Strings file for every Control on every Form (and more), and has English French, & German versions.

Robert

I think that at installation time the user should decide for a Standard language, which is then installed. If he later wants to add a language, this should be possible.