Overview

The Surpac Translation Manager is a simple tool for managing, translating and performing QA functions on a centralised database of messages. The underlying "database" contains all text that is output by Surpac's product range, whether it's the text for dialog forms, menus, tool tips or information processing messages and error messages.

There are three type of files used by the translation manager. They are:

• The master language database (TranslationMaster.uni)
• The work language database (TranslationWork.uni)
• Translation files

All of the files used are unicode (UTF-8) files, which allows them the capability of handling difficult language character sets (like Chinese). It also allows you to edit them in any text editor. PLEASE DON'T. The master file is effectively a central repository for all messages in the system currently, and only gets updated by the Source Code Administrator. No edits are performed directly on the master file.

The work database file contains the entries that have been modified in the Translation Editor. The modifications can be in the form of additions, deletions or simple edits to the database. The work database file is used to store the modifications temporarily until they are made permanent by changing the master database file. The process of updating the master database file from the work database file is called a merge. The merge is done within the Translation Manager user interrface or via command line instructions. The two files are automatically merged during the process of building a work version of the software.

The language translation file is created to store a specified amount of English text entries that have not been translated for a specific language. The default name of this file is the name of the language with a ".uni" extension but this can changed by the user. The number of language translation entries can also be specified up to the number of untranslated entries for that language in the master database file. In the same way as the work database file, the translation file can then be merged into the master database file by the Source Code Administrator.

All three file types have exactly the same format. They all contain information on each message. This information is :

• The message key (unique)
• A message number (optional)
• A category (this allows the translations to be targeted)
• A list of the type(s) of any message arguments
• The translations in all languages that this message is translated for

These files also contain a version specifier, which will allow flexibility later if the need arises.