We need to have our apps be translated into other languages. This entails renaming the .text properties of our visible controls as well as other literals found within our apps to whatever language we need to translate into.
Is this something that can easily be accomplished with .resx files? I was thinking of creating a master resx key/value list where the key would be the fully qualified name of the control/variable/constant etc. and then refactor our apps to look into this file to get their values based on the cultureinfo found at runtime?
Is there a standard or simpler approach to this problem?
Check out FairlyLocal when you get a chance. It's a library that lets you do i18n using GetText, thus allowing you to follow the best practices from the rest of the industry rather than the .resx stuff that MS tries to force on you.
There a quite a few resources for this:
MSDN guide for ASP.NET applications.
Code Project example for WPF applications.
You are correct in thinking that this can be achieved through the use of .resx files. Basically you create .resx file for each language you wish to support and if you give it a name based on the locale (EN-US, DE-DE, etc) then it gets picked up automatically.
Related
I have to rewrite a web application which uses localized resources (strings). But this application doesn't use .resx files, instead all localized strings are in the database. In the Application_Start method, it loads all thoses localized strings and put them in hashtables, this hashtables are in fact "static public" properties of a "static public" class. Application pages uses this Hashtables to retrieve localized strings, the current culture is mentionned in a Session variable.
I know this is not the "natural" way to store and retrieve localized resource. The framework .NET favor usage of .resx files and the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture for storing the current culture. I would use this if I was developing from scratch, but in my case the solution above is already there and the new solution requires some work.
What do I gain from using the .resx files, is the extra effort justified ?
Thanks
EDIT: I think my question is different from the metionned one, since in my case there is already a working solution and I want to know if the effort is justified.
I would think you should get a significant performance increase in application startup.
However, on the down side, you would lose the ability to edit the resource strings without rebuilding the web application.
It really depends on which you value more, the volatility of the resource strings and whether the current application startup performance is causing a problem.
Having rather large project using Resources for internationalization (following this guide: ASP.NET MVC 2 Localization complete guide, using things like data attributes, and so on) we run into the need of translating the resource files. In the beggining of project I selected approach to have lot of small resource files - for each view, viewmodel, controller, ... So I ended up having hundreds of resources. During the translations (which is done by our partners using ResXManager tool we run into trouble identifying the context of the string (where is it displayed, to find out the correct form of translation to make sense when displayed).
So I was asked to make the mutation of application which do not display the localized values, but the keys (or string names). E.g. having string in resources TBL_NAME used somewhere in the view like #ResX.TBL_NAME and translated into english as "Name", I would like to show it in this special mutation as "TBL_NAME", so the translator may see the context - where exactly this string is used.
The best would be, if this is not special build of application, but rather the another "language" of the application available for translators, so he can switch between english and this "unlocalized" languages.
I'm looking some easy ideas of doing this. So far I was thinking of these approaches:
Override ResourceManager.GetString - cannot use, because we use generated Designer classes to access strings massively and so far I haven't find a way to change created ResourceManager (see this answer). Did I miss something?
Create resources for some unused language, which will contain pairs string name/translated value as TBL_NAME/TBL_NAME - viable, but very exhausting since we have hundreds of resources. Also the addition of new resource will require us to remeber that we need to add also this unused language resource will exact same strings name. You also have to do twice much work when adding single string to application.
At the moment, it seems for me, that using resources and current approach it is impossible to solve this task, so I decided to ask this as question (and I'm aware it is rather discussion than question) here, hoping, someone will give me some hint about other approach to solve this problem.
My preferred option would be to give the translators an environment where they can see what they are translating. Rigi requires a bit of setup (basically you need to add an additional UI language), but once you have done that translators can work within the live website - or in a test instance, which is what we did.
They can also work in screenshots, which is convenient when translators would have to access admin or other role specific pages but you do not want to bother giving them all kinds of user rights. These screenshots can be generated as part of automated UI tests or during manual UI testing.
I am afraid I can't say anything about the cost of the solution, but our translators are really happy with it. I am not sure if this is what you are looking for since you asked for an easy solution, but it definitely solves the issue of giving translators the context they need to do their job - better than displaying resource IDs.
I'm working with an MVC 4 app that was originally created with the intention of possibly requiring language localisation so there's a heavy use of .resx files and corresponding embedding of references throughout the project. As it turns out, the app will only ever be used by English speaking audiences and indeed no other languages were ever loaded in. What we've got now is an overhead every time we need to put text on a page and increasing inconsistency as English language is hard-coded into places which can't directly access the resource files such as .js files and reference data in the DB.
Short of a lot of copying and pasting, is there any automated way to extract the English language values from the resource files and replace their references in the views? In a perfect world there'd be a tool to do this and certainly it's conceptually scriptable, does anything like this exist already?
You will have to script it. I have done similar stuff with the O2 Platform AST manipulation Mono.Cecil and mono Cecil APIs.
If you give me a small project with the use can you need (a resx file and an MVC view) I can show you a code snippet example
I haven't seen anything that would take care of this. My first thought is because of the localization issues that could be presented in most "out of the box" solution.
This maybe far fetched, but giving it a shot. Could you write a C# app that would load the assembly that holds the resource file, then loop through every file in the project and replace the resource keys with the values?
As you said, it is possible to be scripted, and this seems like the easiest yet crudest way to complete the task in my mind. Depending on the number of resources you're talking about, obviously it maybe easier and safer to copy/paste.
Satellite assemblies..If you have all app resources placed in a project then create the non-default language you want to implement. For example fr_ca.ErrorMsg | en_gb.ErrorMsg and en_Us.ErrorMsg. The default language can be specified in the main Thread.CultureInfo If en_us then fill you en_us file with all entries need and other resources will only be loaded if it does not exist in the default resource->en_us.
I'm doing .NET Localization with resource files and I encountered with following problem:
I want to provide kind of translation version control. When somebody will change default language version - translator will know what to retranslate.
Resource file is xml and I can to add custom attribute for storing version, but maybe somebody knows better mechanisms for provide this functionality?
Disclaimer: my company builds this product. See Amanuens - it's a web application that integrates with your source code repository and alerts translators when you change/add strings in the source language.
After one day of searching I decided to use tool called Susilizer. For me it has some pros and cons:
Pros:
It's track changes in resource files
I can set my own suggession flags to translation
I can work with group of files like it's single file
Easy add languages
It has filter (so I can sieve fields with changed translation)
Cons:
It costs expensive, but has 30-days evaluation.
try this:
Statellite Ressource Assemblies
We are localizing our forms and strings in a project and are having a problem; Visual Studio creates a resource file for each form when setting Localizable to true.
It's nothing more than a minor nuisance having to send all of the resource files to translators, but is it possible to get VS to use a global resources file instead?
Thanks!
Like Yoda would say, possible it is.
You will have to dynamically translate the dialogs when they are loaded. I did this on several projects and I would say it's much better than having localized resource files.
As others already said, it is possible to use global resource file manually. I believe that it is actually more problematic and less maintainable but still possible.
Now onto why MS decided on one resource file per form. Well, from Internationalization point of view, this solution is better. On one hand it gives translators one important thing: the context. On the other hand, it is typical for project to grow. It is really unlikely that you will make changes to all forms at once. And you know what? Depending on your deal with translation vendor, you can usually spend less on Localization if just few percent of strings would change. That is just because they can use Translation Memory (TM) software.
With one global resource file, there is usually no context and no way to reasonably use TM. The result is, translations are less accurate and take longer (one needs to actually read large blocks of text to make sure everything is correctly translated).
By the way, you do not need to send out individual resource files. Instead you can use some kind of translation kit generator (or translation manager software) to create something useful for translators (for example translation memory friendly file). Sadly, I cannot give you the names of such tools (although I know that there are few of them) since my employer is using custom system for that and I didn't have a chance to work with other tools.
WinFrom doesn't support generating a global resources for Forms automatically in VS.
You must assign the strings by yourself. For example:
Add a Resources.resx with Resources.designer.cs to your project;
Define your strings in Resources.resx.
In your form.cs code, assign the strings in constructor like:
Label1.Text = Resources.Label1Text;