My own personal Tower of Babel

I knew this would come... I suppose I have just been dreading it and procrastinating - but I have finally given the task of translating my entire library of web site functions that comprise the XDe...

Well, not exactly translating it myself - but building in the ability for translation to be possible.

It involved going through close to 1 million Lines of code and finding each hard coded message. Passing that to a little function that tries to find a translation for the Current user´s language preference and show that. If it can´t find the translation it just returns the default English - but makes a note of the request and reports it Back to my master Language Server for translation.

Why now? Well, I´m going to pull the standard Canadian on this and blame it all on Quebec ;) They are interested in the SAR Management System and will need a French version. Rather then take a branch and make a French copy (with very limited future flexibility) I elected to create a dynamic translation system for my entire module set. Since it has the English fall-back - I can implement it right now and it will start reporting Back the translations it needs the most (and in what languages)

Still, it´s a HUGE undertaking - so it should be on-going for some time. I just tried adding the translation code to a single module (I have 35) and this was a small one - it took About 2 hours. I estimate I´m looking at around 250 hours to add the code and then About double for a translator to translate it for each language.


What can you expect - well fairly soon you´ll see a "Select Language" box here on the ´mate but the translations are going to be very limited for a while.

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