Globalization/Internationization

[lizfink]

My company is internationalizing our software. Basically, on our web product there will be a drop down in the upper left corner in which a customer will have a choice of which language to display the application. Ideally, we want the help to change with the application. Is there anyway to incorporate multiple help files in different languages and then have the help change on the fly or compile on the fly when the user selects a new language?

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi lizfink and welcome to the RH community. You can deliver any number of version fo the help. It is the application call where you will have problems. It certainly appears possible for the application to call a specific help file according to the language a user chooses. It just needs specific file names. One thought, if it's a web product I assume you'll be delivering webhelp. As that's the case, I suggest prefixing your file names to differentiate between languages (e.g. FR_topic1.htm - French, EN_topic1.htm - English, SP_topic1 - Spanish). This would make everyone's job easier.

[---Dirk_Bock]

The cleanest way, IMHO, is to for the software developers to build a path to a language specific folder. This path can be changed when the language within the application changes. You'll have to provide a spearate help system for the languages involved and have set up place in in the appropriate folder(s).

This procedure makes handling the translations a lot easier and it allows you to easily use 'default languages' in case the application offers languages you have not already prepared a help for.

---Dirk Bock

[lizfink]

Thank you for the information. Initially we were hoping there was a solution where we didn't have to use multiple help files. However, it sounds like this is the best and cleanest answer to globalization at this stage of RoboHelp's feature offerings.