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Hello fellow Mendix devs! I would love to hear some experiences and workflows from you guys when working with multiple languages in your project. The reason I ask this is to see if we could improve on our own process with our multi-language application. Our default language is Dutch. Secondary languages that we support are English and German. We have worked out a process using exports and imports of labels to and from Excel using the Batch Translate and Language Operation tools in the modeler to easily filter out new and changed labels for each sprint release so we can translate them to English/German and import these new and changed labels. A while ago our Customer Advisory Board suggested to make English the default language of our application. This would mean that we also have to update our translations process to make English the leading language. Unfortunately this has some issues. The most important one is the fact that the English language is less rich than the Dutch language, which has as a result that we can't use the import/export function for label files anymore when English is the leading language. An example is the English word "Bid". The Dutch version of our application has several labels that have the word "Bid" as their translation (e.g. "Geboden", "Bieden", "Bod", et cetera). When Dutch is the leading language, as it now is, the Excel export has a line for each Dutch label with the English word "Bid" as its translation. When English would be the leading language, we immediately get into trouble because we can only use *one* Dutch translation in the Excel sheet that we can import into the Modeler. Of course it is possible to add translations for each label in the modeler separately, but then we would need to find a way to detect/filter out all new and changed labels in the modeler with relative ease and add the translations for the other languages in the modeler. I cannot think of a way currently though to do that. To make matters more complicated: when devevelopers copy a label or text widget and then change the Dutch label in the default language, you will have to keep in mind that the English and German labels are *not* changing. Luckily our label translations workflow prevents this from happening, but when you only have the modeler to work with, this can lead to wrong labels when the developers are not careful/precise enough. Now that I have explained our process and some annoyances ;-) I would love to hear from other developers how their experiences are with multi-language projects. Cheers! Theo

asked 2017-05-30

1 answers