Re: Borland Germany

From: Leo Saguisag (Borland) ("Leo)
Date: 10/15/04 

Date: 15 Oct 2004 10:05:41 -0700

Jan Mitrovics wrote:

> Since I will also go for the English version, I hope you don't mind if
> I give you my point of view.

Please do. Feedback from end-users is important.

> Some drawbacks that I see:
> International versions have (sometimes) delays in delivery and service
> patches (like with D8 at the beginning this year).

These scheduling issues are inherent to all localization, though. It
is very difficult to have a large-scale project like Delphi release
several language versions all at once.

> If you develop for international markets, English should be the main
> language of your product. If you use the localized versions of Delphi,
> all buttons, dialogs, messages, ... are in German. Until D5 or D6 with
> the German versions, the English versions had been included too. This
> was great and gave the developers really an advantage. It would be
> nice if that could be done again (or some kind of multi
> lingualenvironment). I think one of the reasons for stopping this
> from Borland, was that actually they were including two complete
> versions (English + German) with separate license numbers. So you
> effectively got two products for one and some just sold on one of
> them (which of course is a breach of the license). I think that this
> could be prevented, if both versions would share one license number,
> so you can not register them separately.
>
> Until D7 the localized and English versions of consts.pas, etc. have
> been available for download. But you had to find out separately, so
> maybe some did not know. I can't check the issue on D8, since I
> haven't installed it for the moment. But I guess these files are
> missing now.

I had not realized that we had stopped bundling the US CD in the box.
I will see if I can find a way to work around this issue for the
Diamondback release.

> Another problem there is InstallShield Express. It is localized too
> and did not allow to switch to English, so you were bound to a German
> setup, even if you had localized the main program. (Though I do not
> know if the one that comes with D8 still has this problem, since I did
> not install it). Germans are used to English setup procedures. I doubt
> that English or Americans would accept a German installation routine.

ISX is outside of our control, though. We receive that directly from
InstallShield. In any case, you could always go down the route of
using another tool to develop your install.

Thank you very much for the feedback. I will see if your concerns can
be addressed in the Diamondback release. 

-- 
Leo Saguisag
Delphi l10n engineer
About the Borland newsgroups: http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/