Quick ways to localize an existing application

Question

User-1132880023 posted

I have a large existing application, which is in English, that has a mixture of text in resource files, hard coded in javascript, rdls etc.  

Wondering if anyone has advice on how best to quickly localize this into multiple languages.

Answer 1

User-1343066839 posted

Consolidating you localization to one common approach is probably the best.  If it's a web app, you can use the App_GlobalResources for all you common stuff, and use App_LocalResources as needed.  The tricky part is with your report RDLs.  If you are using a facade type layer to run reports (i.e. the report server is not direclty accessible by the end user instead you are embedding reportviewer in app), then I would pass the translated text in the report parameters so you can translate you label etc. in your reports.  If users are using the report manager to run reports, you will have to extract you translations info from a database.  If the later is true for you report rdls, then you might consider putting all you resources in a database and following this article Extending the ASP.NET 2.0 Resource-Provider Model

Answer 2

User-519136805 posted

There is no way which is fast & easy to convert current application in multi-lingual site.

Effort needed in conversion is depends on how existing system has been maintained. if there is no such precausion steps taken care during early days of development than it will be difficult task to convert it in multi-lingual.

As of now , you can create checklist & decide where major changes required to convert existing app in ML (multilingual).

Once you have the checklist , you will be able to decide which approach will be appropriate for you.

Hope this will help !!!