Localizing Screen Captions

1. Copy the cdaily-5.0.0/WEB-INF/classes/captions.properties file to a file for your language, e.g., for Swedish, copy the file to captions_sv.properties.
2. Localize the captions in the file. The left hand side of each line is the mnemonic the program will use to find the caption. Do not edit the left hand side. The right hand side is the text that will be displayed.

In our Swedish example, the line

Print=Print

would become:

Print=Skriv ut

Notes

There is a localization/caption editor available for download from:

http://zaval.org/products/jrc-editor/download/index.html

The LANG= attribute for the HTML tag will follow the language for the captions being used. If the language has a default character flow of right to left, then a DIR=RTL attribute tag will be added to the HTML tag.

The width of the menu pads are controlled by the constants in the captions.properties file. The constants names all start with MPW. For example, mpwHelp controls the width of the Help menu pad.

If your language uses characters that are not in the ISO-8859-1 character set, then you will have to create an intermediate file and use the Java SDK native2ascii conversion program. For example, you are translating Polish for which the native character set is ISO-8859-2. Copy captions.properties to a file named "polish" and perform your edits. The editor that you use will have to save the characters in the character set for your language. Next, run the command:

native2ascii -encoding UTF-8 polish captions_pl.properties

In the example above, the translated file is saved by the editor in UTF-8 format. If you use a different file encoding, replace UTF-8 with the encoding you saved the file in.

When you are running connectDaily, a missing caption will generate a Java Exception. You can check to make sure that you have all required captions. This is particularly important if you have self-translated caption files and you are upgrading to a newer version of connectDaily. To use the bundleChecker run the following command:

java -classpath <path to cdaily.jar> \
      com.mhsoftware.cdaily.support.i18n.bundleChecker \
      captions.properties \
      captions_<language code>.properties

The bundleChecker program will list any missing captions on the screen.

Tip

Running the bundleChecker will create a file name MasterList.txt which contains all of the words in the resource bundle. You can use this file to get a word count for translation.

The master captions.properties file contains notes on the usage and substitution parameters of the strings. If you are unsure of the parameters or how a caption may be used, check the master captions file.