Multi-language Support – XpressDox

Basic Multi-language Support

For Word 2007 and Word 2010, XpressDox supports the user-facing interface in the language of the user.  In this context, a “user” is the person who runs a template.  That means that the XpressDox Explorer, Interview and Ribbon will be in the language of the user.

The template author interfaces, which include the configuration dialogs and Command Editor, are not regarded as user-facing and are only in English.

Initially, the languages supported are English (US and UK), French and Afrikaans.  Further languages are under discussion and implementation will be considered when there is a demand for them (if you would like a specific language to be supported, please indicate this by adding a comment in the XpressDox Forum).

The mechanism used by XpressDox to decide on the user’s language is roughly as follows:

1. The language of Word itself is queried (currently Word can present its user interface in French, English and about another 30 languages).   If the Word language is French, then the XpressDox user language defaults to French, otherwise it defaults to English (US).
2. Where the user’s language is not the language of Word (which will always be the case, for example, where the user’s language is Afrikaans), the user is able to choose, via the Settings menu on the XpressDox ribbon tab, from the four supported languages.  In this way even if the rest of Word is in English, the XpressDox user interface can be set to, for example, French or Afrikaans (or UK English).
3. If the language is chosen as in point 2 above, then XpressDox will select that language for its user-facing interface each time Word is started, until it is changed again.

Bilingualism

In countries with more than one official language, or perhaps even where there is a language which is not official but nonetheless used by many people, it is possible, with XpressDox,  to present the user with an interface in the user’s language, and to extend this to the XpressDox interview, regardless of the language of the template being run.

This means, for example, that a document being prepared in English can have all the interview captions, help text, headings, etc. in French for a French speaker, and in English for an English speaker.  The merged document will nonetheless be in English.  This is done by a slight change to the syntax of the relevant commands.

For example:

«Caption(Signatory,en=Signatory;fr=signataire)» would result in the Signatory data element being presented on the interview with the caption “signataire”  when the XpressDox user language is French, and “Signatory” in the case of other languages.

The following command would extend the above example to include Afrikaans as well as English and French: «Caption(Signatory,en=Signatory;fr=signataire;af=Ondertekenaar)»

«Help(Favourite,en=Include your favorite colors here;en-GB=Include your favourite colours here)» demonstrates how UK English is encoded in the commands.

This bi-lingual syntax applies to the following commands:

• Caption
• ChooseFromRDBList
• ChooseUsingCheckBox
• Footing
• Heading
• Help (including the help text which is coded in any other command after the last ? character)
• InterviewTitle
• Tab

Examples of the usage of these different commands in a bi-lingual context can be found in the Cookbook at Build a bi-lingual interview.