Re: Language Selcection Philosophy

"Tom Lucas" wrote:
Is it just Americans that have their dates the wrong way round or do other
countries do it as well? I miay just enure all dates are longhand to avoid
the problem.

The date format follows the spoken form. In English we say "December
20th, 2005" and we encode it as 12/20/2005"
In Spanish, (my native language,) is "20 de Diciembre, 2005" and
therefore 20/12/2005. I believe in Japanese the year goes first, also
reflecting the way dates are spoken.

In any case, I stick with the format that John Devereux mentions in
another post,

I would format all dates like 2006-05-03 17:12:22.

(that's May 3rd, not March 5th) because, among other reasons, this
makes date and alphabetic sorts consistent which each other.

With respect to the original question: I would use a message file per
supported language plus a mechanism to refer to each message using a
unique ID.
Because (mentioned already):
(1) No "Set of source files per language" configuration control / QA
nightmare.
(2) Easy to outsource translation to other people without distributing
source code.
(3) Allows per site/customer customization, if necessary. For example,
replace an error message such as "Extremely high levels of <put your
favorite toxic gas here> in exhaust" to "Put on your gas mask, leave
the building and when you get out call the plant manager at
123-456-7890"


.

Quantcast