Re: Language selections

Check on the vendor that wrote the package.  This is not a new problem.

Check on the 3rd party outfits that service that package ... BPCS must have 
scores of them ... you may be able to find another outfit that has solved 
this & you can contract with them to have this installed at your customer 
with you getting some of the $$$.

We have had scenarios with customs forms that have to be intelligible in more 
than one language at the same time, such as English and Portugese, and we 
know that the package will be transiting Spanish speaking in between the two.

Many software packages use the IBM multiple human language feature both for 
global users internally signing onto the system, and for output by software 
to external users, such as via reports.  However, the state of art of 
language translation by computer is not as great as by human & some software 
may need to be tweaked to make text intelligible.

I cannot believe that changing LANGID in mid stream job is magically going to 
get you the right words in an application, arranged grammatically correctly 
for that language.

Every place you now use a literal in RPG, like "Discount" or "Terms" you will 
have to substitute a field name or pointer to that word, in which you have 
populated it from either the English collection or whatever language is 
relevant to whoever you doing business with.

We just had a thread in BPCS_L about checks sent to Mexico in which they 
correctly printed the Spanish words for the individual numbers in the check, 
but when strung together they were not stated correctly according to banks in 
Mexico, in the same sense that "Invoice for Fences" is a correct translation 
of "Bill Gates" but not what the customer probably wants, or another example 
... start with "Hydro Electric Dam" and get "Electronic Water Buffalo" if the 
state of art is just to substitute words that mean the same thing in another 
language, or possibly get in trouble for allegedly using swear words.

I believe BPCS uses a system of Message File "BPCS Literals" in which a 
particular number means a particular word, so any language can be substituted 
which works only for individual words, not text strung out like in a 
paragraph.  A separate named member or in separate library for each language 
in which the reference identities are the same ... like PAY0001 might be 
"Pay" in the English one & whatever the equivalent word in the other 
languages ... be careful to allow for the longest possible length of 
translation when parsing whatever comes back from look-up. 

You may or may not be able to do a check run or an invoice run in which 100% 
of the output belongs in the same language, so you have to be able to 
programmatically recognize language for current control break, then get all 
the right fields populated in that language if it is a different one than in 
the previous control break.

Assuming you have someone on staff or on call who can translate paragraphs so 
that they are intelligible in the other languages & all you need are key 
words in the right language, and the application does not already have some 
built-in multi-language capability, then I would create a table in which one 
dimension is the languages we need to do business in & another dimension are 
the words that need to be translated & there is a related issue of making 
allowance for largest word that might be needed in the future & how you 
handle those funny character symbols that some languages need floating above 
some letters ... you may be able to do it via the HEX key on AS/400 keyboards 
for EBCDIC but that stuff does not always translate good to ASCII printers.  
Connect this to a code in each customer or vendor for which language needed, 
with default being English.

You may need to add some stuff to the invoice that is "understood" in English 
speaking countries, like the desired currency to pay back in, and review what 
all is pre-printed on the invoice, some of which may also need translation.

I once worked at a company in which we had standard English paragraphs 
communicating common statements in business, which we paid someone to 
translate for us, then staff could cut & paste the paragraphs they wanted ... 
so long as they did not need to change the "English Master paragraphs" to 
make the message make sense, then we just substituted the corresponding 
foreign language paragraphs & hoped that what we were sending was 
understandable ... we still had to pay someone to translate the 
correspondence that came to us from the foreign country & ask the translator 
to review our standard paragraphs to see if anything needed adding to the 
collection.

>  From:    drasch@mail.win.org (Dan Rasch)
>  
>  I just had a customer call with an interesting problem.  He prints
>  invoices that are mailed to various parts of the world, and wants them in
>  Spanish, French and English depending on the customer.  I told him I was
>  aware of only the QLANGID, which is system-wide.
>  
>  What is the preferred method of changing languages mid-stream in a job? 
>  Is it just to change QLANGID back and forth?  This really seems a bit too
>  simple...

leif@leif.org writes:

> Different languages may use character sets that are different from the
>  one used on your system (extreme case: English vs Japanese), so
>  the message may not print or display correctly depending on the
>  device.

Yes - in addition to figuring out how to interject those weird dots and 
angled lines over & above some letters, you want to be sure your printer can 
handle this.  We often have people sending output to one printer then 
transferring it to another printer, so we have to do department education ... 
this or that printer cannot handle this or that output.

I believe there is a character set issue ... Chinese & Russian are other ones 
... it is not merely using letters in the English language & a few odd 
additions.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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