Better support to UI localization

[vix]

If you want to distribute your application to several countries, you must find a way to localize the UI.

There are a lot of threads in the forum, documents in the NI Developer Zone, etc... but all of them are based on the Export Strings/Import Strings functions.

I think that this approach has some problems:

• difficulties in changing languages on the fly (during EXE execution)
• how can you switch between English and Chinese (or Chinese and Russian), for example?

I had this kind of problems in the past also with CVI, but with the new CVI 9.0, a very interesting, powerful and easy solution has been implemented.

Basically it uses a new property called "charset" that you can set for all your panel, but also for every control of your UI.

Playing with this property you can also have several different languages (mixed single-byte and multi-byte too) on the same window: and it doesn't matter how the language settings of your OS are!!!

Don't you think a localization approach like the CVI one would be nice?

And an Integrated Localization Utility (like CVI) should be appreciated too...

vix

[JackDunaway]

Please refer to this post. There are ways to dynamically switch between different languages, but it is currently not straightforward.

Message Edited by mechelecengr on 07-10-2009 08:32 AM

[vix]

If NI supported Unicode officially It would be a great improvement, but I must point out that the selected solution should be available also in non-Windows Operating Systems.

In the past years NI seemed to reject the Unicode support, and so I asked for a partial solution for the localization problem (as a kind of workaroud)...

[josborne]

Yes, I do think NI's system for localization is lacking.  NI's support for localization (export strings) will basically leave the user with a 5-step process:

1. Export Strings into a "string file"

2. Process the garbled mess in the string file into a simple translatable list of words (e.g. a dictionary file)

3. Translate the dictionary file

4. Go back into the messy string file and translate all the relevant text using the dictionary files

5. Import Strings

Currently, NI only provides tools for step 1 and 5.  The user is left to handle the rest themsevles.  They should really provide a simple tool for Step 2 and 4.  Its not that hard.  I actually built some basic tools for the entire process myself (see www.jpotech.com for download) and SEA is selling a tool that does it all for you (but it costs $1.2k).  There are other tools I have seen floating around the discussion forums, too.

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 8 kudos within 8 years after posting will be automatically declined.