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Author Topic: Quick minireview of translation components tools - my initial experiences  (Read 6284 times)

mouser

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Warning: This post reflects my personal views after a preliminary look at localization components for c++ builder (all are for delphi as well).
I may try to do a more extensive review after I've had more of a chance to try them all.

I've recently been looking for some components to make some of my c++ builder programs localized for different languages.

I've looked at all the solutions I can find.  There are quite a few including:

The free programs Dklang and dxgettext are quite impressive but after playing with them all for a couple of days my feeling was that two products stood out above the others for c++ builder development: korzh localizer and sicomponents tsilang components.

They both offer very elegant gui form translations, and extraction of string resources in your source code.
They both come with free translation tools you can make available to translators, and they both support external language files that can be loaded at runtime.

To me they had the best balance of power, features, price, and ease of use.  That's my personal opinion, and i should say it's only after a day or two of experimenting - not after heavy use.

The good news is that both companies have decided to offer a 50% discount to people planning on entering the bcb contest - which is fantastic.  These tools really can go a LONG way to making it easy to translate your bcb and delphi programs into other languages.  I would definitely recommend checking these tools out.

Now the bad news:
I really cannot for the life of me figure out which of these 2 components I would recommend.  Both have trial versions so you're best bet is to try them out and see which one you like best.  I look forward to hearing your opinions to help me decide as well!

They both have different strengths and weaknesses:
  • I like how tsilang supports plaintext translation files as an option.
  • But I prefer how the korzh localizer stores translated constants in a separate file and used human readable constant strings in your source code.
  • I like how easy it is to do runtime autodiscovery and switching of language files in korzh localizer.
  • But I think the tsilang translator are more polished.
  • I can't figure out if I prefer the approach to using an IDE addon (used in localizer) or the non-visual form component used in tsilang.
  • Both seem regularly updated by enthusiastic and nice developers.
  • Both have active forums.

So as you can see - it's hard to decide between them.  But then on the other hand, I think you probably can't go wrong with either of them :)



You can find the discount in the Discount Code child board of this section.
If you don't have permission to view that section and you are interested in participating in the C++ Builder contest please email me ([email protected]).
« Last Edit: April 26, 2006, 12:34 PM by mouser »