I had to implement multilingual UI for my app recently and the best method I found was using an LLM API inside a script which just runs on build and anytime a new text field gets added it gets the translations and stores it in a JSON where the right strings are picked based on system language or user settings. The annoying part was adjusting the entire UI to the new 'dynamic' string selection functionality but other than that, the tokens I had generated only cost maybe a dollar. I suggest the author looks into that, because waiting for user submissions could take some time
Looking at strings in the linked apptranslator.org website, a lot of them have ampersands (&) e.g. "&Back" or "&Book View"
What do those mean?
Translations seem to put them in the middle sometimes
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on the other hand, there are languages even with "0 untranslated strings" that have untranslated "unused strings" - what are those about, and is it okay to not have those be tracked?
Windows convention for access keys (as opposed to keyboard shortcuts). E.g. you can choose &File > &Open by pressing Alt-F then O (as an alternative to Ctrl-O), with the requisite keys underlined when you press Alt; you can choose the dialog option labelled &Abort by pressing Alt-A, with the requisite key always underlined in the traditional Win32 toolkit. (By convention, OK and Cancel don’t get access keys as you can always use Enter and Escape respectively instead.) Not every menu option gets a shortcut, but in a competently designed Windows UI every one gets an accelerator.
(This idea is nice but not without its problems. For those of us who regularly use more than one keyboard layout or even system locale, it doesn’t work all that well.)
When you press ALT on windows you will see that some characters on menu items are underlined. When you press alt and these letters you can open that menu. To indicate which character to act as that you put & before that.
I'm also trying to avoid the gettext monstrosity to be introduced into our c++ codebase after making equality great experiences with a self-build solution in previous teams. It's ok so solve easy problems by yourself. Good for the author for thinking for himself.
I had to implement multilingual UI for my app recently and the best method I found was using an LLM API inside a script which just runs on build and anytime a new text field gets added it gets the translations and stores it in a JSON where the right strings are picked based on system language or user settings. The annoying part was adjusting the entire UI to the new 'dynamic' string selection functionality but other than that, the tokens I had generated only cost maybe a dollar. I suggest the author looks into that, because waiting for user submissions could take some time
Looking at strings in the linked apptranslator.org website, a lot of them have ampersands (&) e.g. "&Back" or "&Book View"
What do those mean?
Translations seem to put them in the middle sometimes
---
on the other hand, there are languages even with "0 untranslated strings" that have untranslated "unused strings" - what are those about, and is it okay to not have those be tracked?
Windows convention for access keys (as opposed to keyboard shortcuts). E.g. you can choose &File > &Open by pressing Alt-F then O (as an alternative to Ctrl-O), with the requisite keys underlined when you press Alt; you can choose the dialog option labelled &Abort by pressing Alt-A, with the requisite key always underlined in the traditional Win32 toolkit. (By convention, OK and Cancel don’t get access keys as you can always use Enter and Escape respectively instead.) Not every menu option gets a shortcut, but in a competently designed Windows UI every one gets an accelerator.
(This idea is nice but not without its problems. For those of us who regularly use more than one keyboard layout or even system locale, it doesn’t work all that well.)
Looks like the ampersands appear in menu items to indicate the keyboard shortcut key to navigate to that item.
https://willus.com/mingw/colinp/win32/resources/menu.html
When you press ALT on windows you will see that some characters on menu items are underlined. When you press alt and these letters you can open that menu. To indicate which character to act as that you put & before that.
It's been a while, but that might mean that (in the example above) B is the shortcut key for that menu item.
I'm also trying to avoid the gettext monstrosity to be introduced into our c++ codebase after making equality great experiences with a self-build solution in previous teams. It's ok so solve easy problems by yourself. Good for the author for thinking for himself.