Microsoft Captions Language Interface Pack

Here's another automatic translation tool from Microsoft: the Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP). CLIP is an offline real time translator that translates whatever control is under the mouse cursor. CLIP manifests itself as a stand alone window and a tooltip (you can enable/disable both independently). Here's the window:-

Microsoft CLIP

Here's a cut out of a menu with a CLIP tooltip translating "New" into "Nouveau":-

Microsoft CLIP

At the time of writing CLIP supports translation from English (United States) to French (France) and Alsatian (France) and vice-versa but you can probably expect more languages to be added in the future.

CLIP has similarities with another Microsoft technology. Back in May 2004 Microsoft announced Microsoft Application Translator (MAT). This product was designed to translate applications on the fly. MAT was never released but I'm guessing that CLIP is using some of the same technology.

 

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Posted by: GuySmithFerrier
Posted on: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 9:00 AM
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Categories: Internationalization
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ReMix UK 08: Internationalizing WPF And Silverlight Applications

ReMix UK 08 is Microsoft's 2 day UI technologies conference for designers and developers. This year it will be held in Brighton on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th September 2008 and I'm very pleased to say that I will be speaking on the Friday. My session is:-

Internationalizing WPF And Silverlight Applications
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications have as many similarities as differences from Windows Forms applications. The same is true for WPF’s localization model. This session illustrates how to localize and globalize WPF and Silverlight applications and pays particular attention to those issues that are unique to XAML, WPF and Silverlight.

There's lots to cover here and some thinking and some decisions to be made to get the right result.

See you there.

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Posted by: GuySmithFerrier
Posted on: Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 11:18 PM
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Public Strongly Typed Resources With PublicResXFileCodeGenerator

One of the new localization features in Visual Studio 2008 is the PublicResXFileCodeGenerator. In both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 you can create a resource file (e.g. ExceptionResources.resx) and Visual Studio will associate a .Designer.cs file (e.g. ExceptionResources.Designer.cs) with it. The .Designer.cs file contains a strongly typed resource class that allows you to refer to the resource entries as properties of the generated class (e.g. ExceptionResources.CustomExceptionMessage). This system works well but the class and its properties are marked as internal and consequently they can only be accessed from within the same assembly. Visual Studio 2008 allows these classes and their properties to be public. By default the resources are still internal and you can see this by selecting the .resx file in Solution Explorer and then bringing up the Properties Window. You will see a property called Custom Tool and it will be set to ResXFileCodeGenerator. This is the code generator that uses the .NET Framework's StronglyTypedResourceBuilder class to generate the code for the .Designer.cs file. The StronglyTypedResourceBuilder (and its associated command line tool ResGen) both accept a parameter to generate public resources but the ResXFileCodeGenerator sets this value to false and so the resources are internal. Visual Studio 2008, however, introduces a new generator called a PublicResXFileCodeGenerator and this generator sets this value to true. To generate public strongly typed resource classes instead of internal ones set the Custom Tool to PublicResXFileCodeGenerator.

Alternatively you can set the Access Modifier drop down in the Resource Editor to Public to achieve the same result (there are three values: Internal, Public and No code generation). It is worth knowing that this Visual Studio 2008 feature is simply a design time feature and the generated code is still .NET Framework 2.0 compatible.

Of course, it is also possible to write your own replacement for the ResXFileCodeGenerator and PublicResXFileCodeGenerator and you can download an example of this at http://www.dotneti18n.com/downloads.aspx.

Technorati Tags: Localization, Internationalization, ResXFileCodeGenerator, PublicResXFileCodeGenerator, Strongly Typed Resource Classes, resx

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