 |  |
Ask Dr. International
Column #7
Hello from Dr. International. The good Dr. enjoyed being with family and friends this past holiday season, but realized that since he has already broken most of his New Years resolutions that he should share with you some of the questions received over the last four weeks.
On This Page
 | Language IDs supported |
| Reversed Icons in Mirrored Interfaces |
| ExtTextOut and Digit Substitution |
| Print Globaldev Language Keyboard Layouts |
| Microsoft's Internationalization Process |
Language IDs supported
Dear Dr. International,
I would like to know which language IDs from the following does the English version of Windows NT 4.0 support:
Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Chinese, Farsi, Georgian, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kazakh, Konkani, Korean, Malay, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Tatar, Thai, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese
Alexander-Michael
Dr. International replies:
Dear Alexander-Michael,
Although the English version of Windows NT4 has support for pan European languages, none of the locales that you mentioned above are supported on English NT4.
Now the reason Dr. International posted this question is because the good Dr. wants to make the point that any language version, including English, of Windows 2000 and the upcoming Whistler supports all of these languages and many more. You can see which ones by going to a list Language IDs that the Dr. has at this site.
Reversed Icons in Mirrored Interfaces
Dear Dr. International,
I am well on my way to a mirrored user interface for our product. I am, however, perplexed when it comes to the use of a CTreeCtrl. The one minor problem is that the Icons used in the image list are being displayed reversed. I have been unable to find a way to tell the CTreeCtrl to "LAYOUT_BITMAPORIENTATIONPRESERVED". I have only been able to use ModifyStyleEx to turn off WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL, which while drawing the icons correctly, has the undesirable affect of laying the control out left to right.
David K.
Dr. International replies:
Dear David,
The right approach here is to specify the NOMIRRORBITMAP flag in your raster operator flag of APIs in charge of drawing your list view icons like BitBlt or StretchBlt.
ExtTextOut and Digit Substitution
Dear Dr. International,
It appears as though the API ExtTextOut with "ETO_NUMERICSLOCAL" requested is not affected by changes made to "Regional Options" (Windows 2000 with Locale set to Arabic (Egypt) and Menus and Dialogs in English ). The ExtTextOut calls always substitute to Indic digits while the other standard windows controls that I use behave as I expect. When I set "Digits Substitution" to "None", the controls stop substituting, but when set to "Context" or "National" they do.
(from the Internet)
Dr. International replies:
You are right. The ETO_NUMERICLOCAL flag of ExtTextOut overrides the user's preferences with regards to the digit substitution. This means, if the user locale is an Arabic locale (for example) numbers will be always displayed in Indian digits.
As a general rule, to allow a correlation with the rest of the OS outputting of numbers, it's suggested to omit this flag unless you have specific reasons to do otherwise.
Print Globaldev Language Keyboard Layouts
Dear Dr. International,
Found the keyboard layouts located at: /globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx . But I need to print out the complete layouts. Is there another source for the layouts that correspond to Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic? If so, please let me know where to find them.
David C.
Dr. International replies:
Dear David,
The good Dr. gets this question on how to print out these keyboard layouts at least once or twice a month. So, for you and all of those who have yet to ask but have always wanted to know, here is a way to print them. It is a quick and simple process:
| • | Bring up the keyboard you want to print from the list at: /globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx |
| • | Click anywhere with in the keyboard layout you requested |
| • | Press <ALT>+<PrintScreen> |
| • | Open Microsoft Paint |
| • | Press <CTR>+V |
| • | Print from MS-Paint |
Microsoft's Internationalization Process
Dear Dr. International,
We are two English students from Finland currently working on our Master's Thesis on localization. We're doing a case study on the Finnish version of MS Word 2000. We hope you could give us some information about localization: how it is done at Microsoft (procedures, phases, in-house or outsourcing, etc.).
We would really appreciate the help.
Two students from Finland
Dr. International replies:
Dear Studens,
Wow, Dr International is excited to see Universities offering localization master degree. In fact, it took the good Dr. a lot of self teaching and research to obtain his Intl PhD ;-)
Now regarding your question about localization process with Word 2000, there are aspects that the Dr. can disclose and ones that the Dr. can not (patients confidentiality ;-) But in a nutshell here it goes:
Each product within Microsoft has its own approach when it comes to localization. But as a general rule, the globalization and localizability job is a core team responsibility and they are the ones to make sure that all international considerations are addressed within the same source code (single world-wide binary).
Next Microsoft uses a Pseudo-localization approach that allows the detection of major localizability defects without the costs of and time of localizing the UI into another language. Pseudo builds of the product are created at a very early stage and continue to be part of the normal testing until the final UI freeze (where there is no more changes into the user interface).
The localization process is also done at an earlier stage for a small set of pilot languages (Japanese for its DBCS characteristics, German for the length of translated strings, Arabic for right-to-left behavior). But as a general rule, to allow full testing coverage, as soon as the English builds are stable and usable, localized builds for all languages are also being created (of course not everything will be localized at once and a lot of new/updated UI will remain in English).
As for help file localization, these components are usually localized at the end of the project where there will not be any major changes in the UI terminology.
Microsoft uses internal localization tools, but there are plenty of 3rd party tools also available. Depending on the language or on the resources, translation can be done in house or by experienced external partners.
Although Microsoft has been doing this for a lot of years, the most important thing that it does is to constently reveiw the process to see where it can improve. It is this constent re-evaluation that has helped Microsoft create the processes that it has today.
Please keep those questions coming in. See you next time!
Dr. International
Windows International Division