Not my mother tongue: projects abroad & foreign languages

21/05/2009. Evangelina Martinez Ruiz Moreno

It?s not rare nowadays to find ourselves working on projects for clients abroad that need to be written in foreign languages.

The problem might not arise when the language is English or Spanish, since they are two of the most widely spoken languages, and we can probably make a platform that both the programming team and the client understand. But what happens when the project is in French, German or Chinese? In my case all languages I?m not familiar with.

Do I need to make a platform for each language or is there a work around this problem?

I found myself in this situation while working on Wergehthin, a project for a German client. I couldn?t make the application exclusively in German since I wouldn?t understand a word, so my aim was to keep the internal structure in English and provide some solution to translate the HTML pages to German without starting a new application from scratch.

JRapid offers a simple way of solving this that doesn?t involve generating new code or even regenerating the existing one.

As I mention in my article ?Dealing with HTML maintainability in code generated apps? you can attach files to the generated HTMLi pages to obtain different outcomes. Among those files exist the lang files.

You may create a lang file for each language you wish to translate your application?s front end to and it is in this file that you specify the proper translation for every element of the HTMLi page.

Once you have these files ready, all you need to do to switch languages is specify the correct lang in the cookie of the application and JRapid will do the rest.

To find out more about multilingual applications you can read the article ?Multilingual applications with JRapid ?.