Lost in Translation

by Georgia Hutchings on October 23, 2014 11 comments

For the past month I’ve been delving deep into the LiveCode IDE, with the purpose of preparing the product to be localised, so that strings in the UI are in the users’ language of choice. Simultaneously, I have been learning a new programming language myself. 

One of the newest members of the LiveCode Development team, I joined in September fresh out of University looking forward to immersing myself in the world of software development, and picking up a new programming language to boot. I was excited to learn LiveCode, and seeing how well I’d be able to pick it up – as surely that’s the point, after all. 

After a day of settling in and getting myself set-up and ready to work, I began my first project, localising the IDE. Initially, the project required me to trawl through reams of LiveCode script, looking for strings that would need translating, making a note of these strings and passing these strings through a dummy function. The dummy function just returned the strings in all capitals, making it easy to see what had been “translated” and what hadn’t. Ultimately, the localisation function would return the string in the user’s selected language, but for now the project just required that the IDE was prepared for translation and everything that would need eventual translating was documented. 

The first stage of the project, while laborious, was an excellent learning curve for me. I was able to get in to the nitty-gritty of the product, see LiveCode being put to use and begin to write a small amount of LiveCode script of my own. I also got to see the ups and downs of changing the IDE through the IDE – a challenge in and of itself – instantly being able to see changes made or managing to break the IDE with one typo! It also highlighted how the product wasn’t designed with localisation in mind, as I came upon obstacles to translation such as images with English text in them.

The next stages, which I am working on now, involve me preparing the strings for translation, creating a tool for the translators and writing the localisation function. It was in these stages of the project that I was really able to start writing my own LiveCode script. Not only was I able to start doing this with relative ease, with some questions for specific situations, I quickly found myself able to fire off script in LiveCode as if I were writing some text in English. Having done a bit of programming at University and an internship in mobile development, I am not a complete novice when it comes to programming. However, I was impressed at how natural programming in LiveCode felt and I’m pleased to be part of a project that is making the product more accessible to budding developers around the world. 

Georgia HutchingsLost in Translation

11 comments

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  • Devin - October 23, 2014 reply

    Welcome aboard, Georgia! Best wishes for success in this most important project.

    Georgia - October 24, 2014 reply

    Thanks Devin!

  • BvG - October 24, 2014 reply

    They force you to sieve trough every script in the IDE? Sadistic bastards 🙁

    Georgia - October 24, 2014 reply

    Like I said, it was a good learning experience 😉

  • Yan - October 26, 2014 reply

    Como puedo internacionalizar una aplicacion movil desde livecode 7?, requiero que todo mi producto se traduzca al idioma que el usuario prefiera, muchas gracias y espero su ayuda. y una cosa mas, Bienvenida Georgia.

    Georgia - October 29, 2014 reply

    Gracias Yan! No hablo Espanol..

    I did a quick google translate (not always the best) and I think you are trying to find out when your mobile app can be translated. The work I am doing is translating the IDE only, however if you look at the post from Max above he suggests a translation tool that may be of use to you.

    Buena suerte!

    Georgia

  • MaxV - October 27, 2014 reply

    Hi Georgia,
    I suggest you to use transifex (https://www.transifex.com/), since Livecode is opensource, all users can contribute to translation using this web tool.
    Best regards
    Max

    Georgia - October 29, 2014 reply

    Hi Max,

    Thanks for the suggestion, that looks like a really useful tool. I’ll have a look into it and see if it is something that we can use at LiveCode.

    Georgia

  • Quentin - October 27, 2014 reply

    Hi Georgia,

    It’s nice to have these little personal blogs from the members of the team about their work on the project.

    I was interested to read your experiences as a newcomer to Livecode, since I am still very much a newbie to the Language and IDE too. I, however, don’t really have much programming experience, I’m just an advanced end user of software who got fed up with missing features and decided he’d have to roll his own software.

    One thing I have found with Livecode has been a big initial uphill struggle to understand the guts of the thing. There just seems a big gap between the deep gobbledygook where everyone is talking with some common, but foreign to me, deep understandings of some arcane inner workings and the few introductory basics tutorials out there. I would hope that as a newcomer to the product you could be giving some kind of internal feedback that might help to improve this situation?

    Also, isn’t the IDE being updated and re-written with modular extensibility anyway for 8.0? Perhaps some updates to the Roadmap page now that 7 is released are in order?

    Georgia - October 29, 2014 reply

    Hi Quentin,

    When I first started programming at University a few years ago, it also seemed to me that everyone was speaking gobbledygook – and to be honest, I hated it! I found that the best way to learn is to just sit down and code. No amount of reading really helped, but the more I did, the more I understood.
    With all programming languages that I have come across so far, I have found that there are a wealth of helpful resources on the internet. For LiveCode I have found the Dictionary (http://livecode.com/developers/api/6.0.2/) and the forums (http://forums.livecode.com) to be really useful. Hopefully they will be of use to you too.
    The IDE is going to be updated with modular extensibility in 8.0, helping users to build apps quickly and more easily — eliminating that initial uphill struggle!
    Good luck, and I hope that you are able to get over the hill and it will be plane sailing from then on.
    Georgia

  • Ru - April 16, 2017 reply

    Hello Georgia
    What happens until now? Is there now a place to help to localise Livecode? Some users asked this still in 2013… for French or German.

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