Some Opinions on the multilingual method of software

I helped LP find an osCommerce as an online store and installed a Plog diary on the machine at home. It is an open-source project based on PHP + MySQL and runs smoothly in Windows, the Simplified Chinese Language Pack has been found for ease of use.

Open-source software such as TortoiseCVS, Mantis, and CommunityServer are also used in the work. Some of them have ready-made Simplified Chinese language packs and some need to be manually modified, some software only supports English version (only source code can be translated; although source code is available, it is too much work to translate the source code, in addition, this translation method is required again after the source code upgrade );

When using open-source projects, it is very interesting to find many open-source projects that are not based on DotNet (such as PHP + MySQL-based Web programs such as osCommerce, Plog, And Mantis) it provides a good multi-language mechanism, and generally provides language files in text format. As long as the Translater can be translated directly using notepad, even the EXE files written in C ++ like TortoiseCVS, a. po files can be directly translated. In contrast, DotNet-based open-source projects have never seen such a simple mechanism. Most of them are like CommunityServer unless they modify their source code, otherwise, it would be difficult to thoroughly refine the definition. SharpDeveloper provides resx resource files and requires special tools for editing. This is not known as the mechanism limitation of DotNet, or the developers of these open-source tools never thought about this implementation;

What bothers me most is NDoc. This software should provide multilingual interfaces (the final generated documents should be localized rather than all in English ), however, its translation method can only be to manually modify the xslt file in the source code, and then re-compile it; otherwise;

I prefer the first method. After all, the Translater and Developer are different. It is possible that the Translater is very proficient in program usage, but does not know anything about program development, therefore, the most simple and best translation work.