A New Project

Well ... not really new as such ... more like a continuation of one I made a start on 18 years ago!

One of my more thoughtful "users" has recently enquired about the possibility of translating the famous TaskMaster system into Spanish. Tarea de Maestro? I've had a quick play and reckon I have code already in place that could form the basis of a "look-up table" to translate the field labels that appear on the forms. Basically, I would adapt an existing datafile which is already used to enforce standardised descriptions, correct "typos", and such.

"Eqpt type code" would appear as "Codigo de tipo" if a Country field was set to "ES", for instance. And "Manufacturer" would appear as "Fabricante", and all the rest. The bulk of the work required be in the translation of the Help file, however. I have zero Spanish (or any other language) skills myself, of course, but would need to rely upon an on-line translator. I see a long Summer of work stretching ahead of me (so much, then, for any thoughts about digging out my bucket and spade)!

All this has re-kindled memories of an attempt I made on a (much) earlier version to "translate" technical words in a dBASE database from English to Arabic. Because that needed an Arabic character set, and the program was running under good old DOS back in those days, I had used an old version of Nafitha. But I had to rely upon Arab friends (who were, in actual fact, not all that reliable, especially as they never seemed able to agree upon this word or that), coupled with a fair amount of detective work on my own, to work out my Arabic translations. First I made a list of phonetic spellings (so "maintenance" became "al-seena", for example) then used Nafitha to provide the corresponding Arabic script (right to left, of course). That was a long time ago now (yes, 18 years, as already mentioned), but I reckon it would be easier now with modern tools (and character sets)!

Those dBASE databases were quite useful to me at the time. There were three fields. When in a browse you would see the English word in the left-hand column ("grease", let's say), then in the next column we would have entered the phonetic "Arabic" spelling ("sha-ham")* and in the third (thanks to the magic of Nafitha) we would put in the Arabic script. This was very handy for non-Arabic speakers (like me) as I could pronounce the Arabic word whilst understanding what it meant! Ultimately, my aim was to produce the Arabic billing documents required by our client, automatically from my program (and my data).

Why am I mentioning all this? Well, perhaps the time has come to have another go. English to French, Italian, Spanish ... should be straight forward enough. But what about Polish, Tagalog and Turkish, for example? And what about languages that don't use Latin characters (eg, Arabic, Malayalam, Urdu)? Would a simple phonetic "translation" be any use? At the moment I don't see any easy way for the programming languages that I use to call another character set (Arabic, for example) directly to the screen, but this may well be possible. But at the moment I have to rely upon the extended ASCII character set, and switching between Code Pages if necessary and/or possible (that is, nothing esoteric like Unicode).

So, if anyone has any translation data already available, or indeed would like to collaborate on this Great International Gesture, feel free to shout (crier, gridare, gritar ... whatever)!

I wonder whether HTML is the answer?

* In cases where more than one word was available to correspond to the English, I would always default to the common, or "street" version!