How to help translate DeeEnEs in your language

Do you want to help translate DeeEnEs into your own language (or any other language with which you are sufficiently fluent)? Then I will explain to you what you must do:

1. Download the sources.
2. Extract them to your hard disk and locate the english_resources_template folder.
3. Make a copy of the template folder renaming it to <your_language>_resources.
4. In the new folder edit the project file (DeeEnEs_lang.dsp) with a text editor and replace all occurrences of YourLanguage with the English name of the language you are translating to.
5. Do the translation. There are several ways possible ways you can go about making the translation:
   1. You have Visual C++. This is the recommended way. You just open the project file that you edited in step 4 en start translating the dialogs, menus and strings. The good thing about doing it this way is that you can easily change positions and sizes of the labels and controls to them to the needs of the language you are translating to.
   2. You will use a text editor. This will be harder to do for you. All the strings are buried between lots of other information like menu and dialog definitions and lots of numbers and identifiers. The second problem is that you can't see when a string needs a little bit more space and therefore a button needs to grow or an edit control moved a bit. It also means that I have to go over the result to the adjusting for you and it will most likely take some time before I'll be able to publish the result to the website.
6. Send me the DeeEnEs_lang.rc file.

What if you don't have Visual C++ and don't want to mess about with a text editor but you have another resource editor? This has the same advantage as using Visual C++ of being able to adjust the labels and controls to the texts you are writing. It has the disadvantage that it is more work for me to finally integrate it with the entire DeeEnEs project and it will therefore be probable that I will take a bit longer before being able to publish it on the website. If you do it this way you:

1. Download the program.
2.  Load the DeeEnEs.exe into your resource editor and translate the texts.
3.  Send me the adjusted executable (in a ZIP file please, Outlook blocks unsafe attachments).

Some things to think about

• Don't make the strings much longer than the English original, this will prevent you (or me) from having to make too much changes to the layout of the dialogs.
• Try to be as concise as possible. Especially for buttons and labels you should try to use as few words and letters as possible without becoming unclear.
• Use abbreviations only where necessary (or use very commonly used abbreviations only).
• Try to stay as close to the original English meaning as possible but don't always translate too literally.
• There are some places in the resources (especially the Version section) where you will encounter the word [YourLanguage], of course you should enter the name of the language you are translating to.
• In the Version section of the resource file you can put your own name in the Comments field (don't leave Your Name Here in there!). You should preferably leave this section in English.