Language Translation & Keyboard Characters 1

[Sorrells]

My client desires that certain text in the data tables of the application I am building be available to users in Spanish and Russian both in forms and reports.

I feel confident about the ability to create additional tables with translated text but am unsure how to handle special keyboard characters, particularly in Russian for display on the PC prior to printing. Any thoughts on this subject and references to possible resources would be greatly appreciated.

In addition, in 2 cases within the running of the program, she wants a translation from English to one or the other language on the fly. I have spent considerable time looking for possible translators with little success. Again, I'd sure appreciate comments from those who have built similar environments.


Regards, Sorrells

 

[Sorrells]

I have not gained much information since posting. In searching the Newsgroups I ran across a convention for incorporating all languages into a character code called Unicode. Apparently this is an expanded character set from ASCI that is 2 bytes in length and can incorporate any language used today, the larger size being able to hold a much larger range of characters.

According to what I have read, this was a major enhancement from Access97 to 2000. Yet, I found little about using Unicode in VBA coding. There are font sets for Unicode, perhaps rather limited. I found references to two, Code2000 and Arial Unicode MS. Are there more and where are they to be found?

If these font sets are not commonly found, can I incorporate them in a commercially produced program?

What bothers me is that I found nothing on how to leverage Unicode. For example, it I created two related data tables, one in English and another in French then wanted to display or print both out of a query would this require any thing out of the ordinary? This I will experiment with today.


Regards, Sorrells

 

[Sorrells]

Microsoft has included language support to Windows 2000 O/S and later for Unicode and a variety of keyboard languages in Win98 and later. I have found that the selection of languages varies from one O/S to another. For example I found Russian on my Win98 PC but not on Windows 2000.

I have spent considerable time searching in forums and newsgroups for information about this capability but without success. I do not even know Microsoft's standard name for this capability. I found the following possible keywords that might reference it but not one explicit document describing it. The keywords are multilingual pack, codepage and Start/Programs/MS Office Tools area.

I do not understand how MS can support several foreign languages in Win98 if this O/S does not support Unicode either.

I need to obtain information if it is possible to incorporate specific languages in a deployable run-time Access XP CD specific languages and the capability to install them on the PC of a person purchasing the program if any of these languages are missing from the PC's selection list.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone with knowledge in these subjects, if such deployment is possible and advice on how I might do this.


Regards, Sorrells

 

[mymou]

Hi Sorrells

Check out 'Dr. International' on MS web site. I have contacted this department in the past and they put an awful lot of effort into my 'internationalization' problems. Well worth getting touch.

This is all the advice I can give, but you might be able to help me. I had thought that unicode was the solution to most internalization issues - and now using VBA in Access XP the Greek charactors in Access are turned into ???????. This makes my treeview look a bit silly! Any ideas? I hope i am missing something obvious.

Stew

PS In terms of translation on the fly - try looking into

http://www.worldlingo.com.

Not sure what criteria you have or what solutions they provide - but might be worth looking into.

 

[Sorrells]

Stew,

Your problem sounds interesting. I will soon be to the point where I'll be wanting to load Spanish into textboxes, maybe listboxes and certainly reports. Where is the failed translation taking place? The series of question marks? In the table, form control, report?

I looked into 2 fairly new references I acquired about VBA and Unicode. There was no discussion of the practical side for this enhancement, that is leveraging Unicode for the proper display of various language sets. I had noted this absence when searching the web for information as well.

There are two areas that bear inspection however. First, if this problem area is a textbox, look at the property Keyboard Language (under Format). Mine is set to 'system'. Could or should this be manipulated via VBA to Greek if Greek characters are to be displayed? My references don't say but the question remains.

The other area is the Access function strConv. As I am learning to expect, Access XP Help cannot bring up any information on this function. Access97 is more supportive.

The VBA Developer's Handbook by Getz & Gilbert, 1997 had this to say:

"This function [strConv) allows you to specify a string, as well as a conversion parameter indicating the conversion you'd like to make. In general you call the function like this:

strOutput = strConv(strInput,intConversion)
where strInput is the string to be converted and intConversion is a value from the following table. The converted string is the return value from StrConv.

Constant: Description

vbUpperCase: converts to upper case
vbLowerCase: converts to lower case
vbProperCase: converts first char of every word to upper case
vbUnicode: converts string to Unicode using the default code page of the system.
vbFromUnicode: converts from Unicode to default code page of the system.

In the glossary I have accumulated, Code Page is defined as:

"Ordered set of characters in which a numeric index (code point) is associated with each character of a particular writing system. There are separate code pages for different writing systems, such as Western European and Cyrillic. See also Unicode."

I hope the above might be of some help. On my part, I'll check out 'Dr. International'. I do not recall having been there.

Please continue posting as you come to a resolution. There is a dearth of information of the practical programming for the display and conversion of foreign languages!


Regards, Sorrells

 

[Sorrells]

Stew,

Look at the links at the bottom of this Microsoft web page.

http://www.microsoft.com/AccessDev/a-a&sa.htm#localization

Regards, Sorrells

 

[mymou]

Hi Sorrells

Thanks for the speedy reply. I really do know what you mean about the dearth of information on internationalisation issues. Tempted to move to Java yet?

I found a suitable solution for my problem - although far from perfect. Simply by changing the settings in Windows XP ("select a language to match the language version of the non-unicode programs...&quot the Greek worked as expected. This works for me - but not a solution for a commercial application.

However, this means that 'the system' is not working as expected. I had expected Windows XP and Office XP which are both unicode based to be the final solution to my problems. However, it appears that VBA (which is where I get my ?????) is not working in unicode - so expect some unexpected problems.

I have more problems - I will keep you updated.

Regards
Stew