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  • Crazy question

    Has anyone ever written something that would allow a user to "flip a switch" and automatically change the screen language? I'm thinking along these lines (I have NO idea if this is possible or even makes sense)
    1. a lot of our users are Spanish speakers
    2. I don't want to write two screens - one in English and one in Spanish
    3. I can populate the text fields on the screen from within the program
    4. If the user wants Spanish, the program should be able to take what I've already written and send it out to "Google Translate" or Watson or something using web services and come back with the correct translation which I could then use to populate the screen fields.

    What do you think? Is that totally stupid?

    Please let me know what you think because if it makes sense, I may pursue it - my company is big on innovation ideas.

  • #2
    Interesting! We're facing the same challenge (for French though), and I had the same thought - it's surprising to me that the "screen-scrape" companies haven't come up with something like this.

    A workaround we're considering is using the translate feature in the Chrome browser, and using a webified green-screen interface - no code changes would be needed that way.

    Cheers,

    Emmanuel

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    • #3
      Are you talking about green screen programs or web programs?
      We are working in both cases with Message-Files. One Message File for each languages and the same message id and translated text are identical in all languages. In green screen we specify message ids instead of any message text in our display files. At runtime the message text is automatically read from the (language specific) message file. No need for having multiple display files.
      At runtime we copy the language specific message file into the QTEMP library with a generic name, for example the German Message file MYMSGFD is copied into the QTEMP with the name MYMSGF. If the language get changed for example to English, the "German" Message file in the QTEMP is replaced with the English one, i.e. MYMSGFE is copied into the QTEMP with the name MYMSGF.
      The QTEMP library preceedes all other libraries in the library list. An voila your green screen program is either in Englisch, or in German or in Spain or what ever language.

      For Web-Applications we also retrieve the message textes for the language from the language specific message file (with the aid of an RPG procedure). The message textes get cached and if the language is changed, we switch from the cached German message textes to the cached English Message Textes.

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      • MelissaG
        MelissaG commented
        Editing a comment
        I was specifically talking about green screens. Using message files hadn't occurred to me. I'll look further into that. Thanks. We're in a small town and I don't know that anyone really thinks about these things, but if we can do it (and can find someone to proofread the translations!), I think we should.

    • #4
      I use OVRMSGF to control it. The default language used is that on the user's user profile.
      Regards

      Kit
      http://www.ecofitonline.com
      DeskfIT - ChangefIT - XrefIT
      ___________________________________
      There are only 3 kinds of people -
      Those that can count and those that can't.

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