Re: Spanish Help Text

You might also ask your SSA account representative if SSA has any problems 
with what you are planning, since this stuff is copyright them.  If you do a 
less that perfect job it might reflect badly on them from perspective of BPCS 
sales to other Mexican factories.  If you do a terrific job, other customers 
might want the same deal.

You might check MIDRANGE_L archives.  There was a recent thread there about 
the state of art of translating stuff on the 400 between English & Spanish & 
the answer was that there aint one for the 400 & there aint one for PCs, 
there is just software that people make a lot of money selling other people, 
that does not work satisfactorily in the real business world.

We have not had occasion to use this, but it seems like there are 
multi-lingual options at the BPCS 405 CD level, which we have.  If you are a 
BPCS Security Officer go into SYS600 screen & look at the top line where it 
defines a USER as having, or not having, command line attention key 
authority, then over on the far right upper corner there is a code for the 
user's LANGUAGE.

Also in the OS/400 WRKUSRPRF Security, there is a space for the user's 
LANGUAGE.

My understanding was that the function of this was to make it possible for 
one AS/400 to support people who are native in different languages at the 
same time ... the USER ID specifies what LANGUAGE they see stuff in, but it 
is just words, not neccessarily a good translation & of course if I SNDMSG to 
someone else, that is not translated.

My understanding is that the LANGUAGE setting of the USER in the BPCS 
Security setup causes selection of a LANGUAGE LIBRARY in their BPCS *LIBL 
library list in which SPANISH speaking people would have a different library 
than FRENCH speakers.  

This affects all sorts of things ... error message text, literals on screens 
explaining what the various values signify.

This is explained some place ... I would start looking with the DOC menu, 
document SSALOG00.

Perhaps the price on the entire Spanish version is more than you can justify, 
but perhaps you can get pieces of it.

If you want to translate the HELP text, the English version is in QPNLSRC 
written in UIM, which is similar conceptually to HTML - I not learned this 
yet.

You would need to be able to get the TEXT to WORD with the UIM lines stripped 
off, assuming this is alien to the human translator, and have the translator 
familiar with what fits on a BPCS 400 screen & make suggestions regarding 
breaks in the text, and you then have to figure out how to reinsert the UM 
lines ... you almost need an automatic generator like SDA where someone 
doodles the text, and the source gets compiled.

If you are not using a human translator, you probably want to leave the UIM 
lines intact, but somehow program the translator software to ignore the UIM 
lines so that you do not convert code lines that need to be a certain way to 
Spanish equivalents that won't compile.

How does SSA write this in the first place anyway ... does As/Set do this?

One thing I have noticed is that the same phraseology shows up again & again 
& again, especially in the on-line documentation.  What this or that field is 
for & what can go in it, and how that program works.

There may be value in organizing your copy of the documentation, so you have 
explanations by field, then this might cut down on the amount of translation 
you need to do.

> From: Lisa.Abney@sensient-tech.com
>  
>  Hi!  Couldn't quite figure out which list this question belonged on, so
>  thought I'd start here.
>  
>  We're implementing BPCS (4.0.5, non-CD) in two facilities in Mexico.  We
>  could not negotiate a reasonable price on the Spanish version of the
>  software, and the users there think they'll be OK with the English version
>  of the screens, but we all agree it would be really nice to have the help
>  text in Spanish.
>  
>  Has anyone ever done this, or have suggestions as to the best way?  In RPG,
>  these are just text files.  I'm considering purchasing an English/Spanish
>  translation software package, converting the text files to a Word document
>  (haven't figured out how, but I'm sure it can be done!), doing the
>  translation, then converting the Word document back to the text file.  This
>  sounds rather cumbersome, but better than hiring someone to do the
>  translations manually.  Any idea if this will work, or any better ideas?

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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