Issues with Chinese and Japanese software localization -> solved

HELLO WORLD

another small step for the humanity, but another huge step for us!!!

Tabbles in Chinese

Why did it take so long? (check the update below after this)

We previously tried to generate the .resx (the language file) using Zeta resource editor which works like a charm with languages using the Latin alphabet (as well as with Russian) but apparently didn’t produce a valid file when we tried to use it to localize Chinese and Japanese. Maurizio did first  tried with ResEx with Notepad++ and those failed… the problem lies in the file encoding: even if it’s they save an utf8 file, there seems to be something fishy about it – were we doing something wrong? Any hint would be appreciated. Then he successfully edited the Chinese .resx file in VisualStudio 2010,  and (surprise-surprise!) Emacs worked too:

Emacs can produce a good localization file for Chinese

Now we’re investigating more localization tools that can handle Chinese/Japanese correctly… will update the post as soon as we find one.

Update: we realized that problem is only the editor (or its configuration)

Let’s look at them one by one: lets open the .resx file (the XML file containing the string ID and their localization) and let’s see how this .resx file looks in each editor:

Notepad++

Chinese localization file, Notepad++, some characters are not displayed correctly

Zeta resource editor

Chinese localization file, Zeta resource editor, some characters are not displayed correctly

Emacs

Chinese localization file, Emacs, it looks perfect

Word 2010

“]

Chinese localization file, Word 2010, it looks perfect - p.s. Word 2010 rocks!

…but the funniest one is skype

Chinese text in Skype - in the editor it looks fine, in the body of the conversation there are missing characters... :-O

So, what’s going on here?

Plain and simple: each program appears to work just fine and they output a .resx file that is perfectly usable in Visual Studio 2010 -> Tabbles starts and the localized language is displayed correctly. Nonetheless, each editor has some issue with rendering some Chinese characters (just a few Kanji seem to be broken, but most of them are rendered just fine… :-O ).

Well, kinda happy ending, isn’t it? Now we know that we can go with our old beloved Zeta resource editor which is behaving well even if it didn’t seem so

- >Now we need translators: :-)

We have a few for Chinese, but no one yet for Japanese… WE NEED YOU NOW! Please check the translation page on our forum.

A. + M.