Back on December 10, 2006, I provided instructions for manually editing an XML file to add support for your preferred language to the Developer Network, and invited the community to assist us. We have had a great response already, with translations provided by community members for several new languages. The current list of supported languages can be seen by going to the Embarcadero Developer Network home page and placing your mouse over the currently active language to the left of your name at the top of the page, which gives you links for explicitly choosing the language you want to use for browsing the Developer Network. You will see a pop-up window similar to the following:

Hide image

1 Languages currently supported on the Developer Network

For the publishing and content management engine we've written for the Developer Network, we have a list of standard strings that are loaded from this XML file to make it easy to support strings in a variety of spoken languages. See the end of this article for information on the actual format.

Rather than having to edit the XML file directly, we now have a tool available, called the CDN Strings Editor (CSE) that makes it much easier to edit, update, merge, and export string definitions for any language from the strings.xml we use for storing our localized strings. You can download our live version of strings.xml from https://gp.embarcadero.com/view/template/strings.xml. (The editing tool requires .NET 1.1, and the .NET assemblies included in the archive on CodeCentral.)

If you want to update or add support for another language, please download the zip file from CodeCentral, extract it, and review the information below on using CSE.

    Loading the strings.xml file

    Editing the strings

    Adding a new language

    Saving your changes

I would like to thank the following people for their translation efforts thus far. If I miss anyone, I apologize in advance, and please email me a reminder.

As we prepare for the launch of codegear.com, we've been doing some refactoring of our publishing engine for the Developer Network. As a result, we have made it significantly easier for our presentation and publishing engine to support localized languages.

All strings presented to the user from the main navigation template are now retrieved from an XML file. The XML has a definition for each user interface string, which will look something like this fragment:

<StrConference value="Conference Proceedings">
  <br value="Documentos das Conferências" /> 
  <cn value="研讨会讲演" /> 
  <de value="Tagungsbände" /> 
  <es value="Documentos de las Conferencias" /> 
  <fr value="Compte-rendu des conférences" /> 
  <jp value="カンファレンス" /> 
  <ru value="Конференции" /> 
  <tw value="研討會講演" /> 
</StrConference>

If you would like to add support for your native language, download the latest strings.xml file from CodeCentral and update it with definitions for your language. Please be sure to use a UTF-8 compatible editor and save it as a UFT-8 document. (Windows Notepad supports UTF-8 for example.)

Upload the updated version to another entry in CodeCentral (and email a notice to me, John Kaster), or just zip up and email the file directly to jkaster@codegear.com and we can add support for your language on the Developer Network.

If you don't want to navigate through the large document with all localized strings, you can create one with just your language strings in it, like this:

<StrConference value="Conference Proceedings">
  <xx value="My 'xx' language" /> 
</StrConference>

The "xx" in this snippet is used as an example for an "additional language." Please use the appropriate ISO standard 2 character abbreviation for your language.

We'll either use your file directly, or merge the changes into our master XML document.

Please note: the list of strings in this XML document will grow over time, but missing translations are gracefully defaulted to the English version if a translation is not available. This is similar to the way our content selection works for your preferred language.

I hope this new feature will allow us to support for your preferred language, if it is not yet available on the Developer Network.

John Kaster

Developer Network Architect