Going global with Delphi 5

May 9, 2000

Delphi 5 Enterprise

With the introduction of Delphi 5, Borland has put a lot of effort to the internalization tools in its premier development tool. The Integrated Translation Environment, or ITE for short, allows developers create international versions of their applications faster than ever before.

The Integrated Translation Environment is a feature in Delphi 5 Enterprise, the high-end version of Delphi. The environment consists of three tools, namely the Translation Manager, the Translation Repository and finally the Resource DLL wizard (see below).

These three tools together facilitate software localization for different input locales. Each localized version of the application becomes part of a Delphi project group (.bpg if you will) so you can easily manipulate each individual version of the project easily within the Delphi IDE.

The Resource DLL Wizard

If you already have a project that uses a certain locale, for example the US English locale, you can let Delphi's new Resource DLL Wizard build a list of your project's localizable strings. The DLL Wizards initially asks the locales to which you want to target your application, but you can of course add or remove locales at later time if you wish.

Once all the necessary settings have been set, the Wizard will compile your project and then scan through it. It isolates all the localizable strings, and finally displays a status dialog displaying statistics about the scan. Even the most minimal Delphi project will have hundreds of translatable items (see below).

Translating your strings

After the initial project scanning is complete, Delphi displays the Translation Manager, as seen in the following figure. The Translation manager is essentially a list of the localizable strings and their forthcoming translations to different locales. When you first use the Translation Manager, you will manually need to translate all the necessary strings into the target locale.

However, having translated all the strings, you can save your translations into the translation repository.

This feature makes sure you do not need to retranslate the strings each time you want to localize a project. Further, you can import and export the textual data in XML format. This format should be flexible enough so that most modern applications can process the data. If you are using an outsourced translation service, make sure they can accept the XML format too.

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