Multi language support

We have customer all around the world, for us an easy multi language support is an essential feature. We are valuating to ditch our current HMI software and switch to Ignition but we need an easy way to handle multiple languages.

One possible solution will be make a tool that browse the project and extract all the strings in a table. The table may have a column that help identify the source of the string (Example: page.object.property) and one column for each project defined language.
Then, at run time, the tool will replace the string based on the selected language.

There is a way to do this yourself in Ignition. You can make a client dataset tag that holds all of the translations for each language. Each component that has text can be bound to an expression pulling out the selected language from one of the rows in the dataset.

Good morning/afternoon.
It means that Ignition doesn’t have any built-in (pre-prepared) tool for switching languages on Vision client machines?

And if there is some language-switching tool included - are there also (frequently used) System strings (not only Project object’s texts) included for the possibility of translation? E.g. Viewer Menu, various pop-up Notices/Warnings/Errors etc. which may occur on operator (Viewer) screen.

There is nothing built-in right now. We plan on building in a translation tool for the clients soon.

It would be nice if all the system texts that are ever displayed on View client screens could be exported to some CSV file, there translated by system integrator and imported back to enable switching between the View client languages.

Is there some estimated time of releasing the translation tool?

We don’t have an exact time for when it will be released but it is looking like around June 2013. The idea is that we can push all text through a translation map automatically. You can translate any of the strings to multiple languages and Ignition will automatically switch it based on the language.

+1

++1
We really need that. :thumb_right: :thumb_left:

+1

I was wondering how it was going with the multi-language support feature – is it still being worked on? If so, what will it look like and when is the scheduled release date?
Thanks!

Yes! It’s good idea!

Travis’ answer above is still accurate, this feature is one of the primary features of 7.7. It might not be done by June, since 7.6 is only being released on May 7th, but we’re going to try to keep the cycle as short as possible.

Regards,

Any update on this?

Any update on this?

Hi,

It is being actively developed. We should have something to show within another month or so.

Regards,

any news? :wink:
thanks!

Well, progress is being made… we should be showing it a bit at the community conference in a few weeks. Not sure when it will be release-ready, but I’ll let those who have expressed interest know when a testable preview build is available.

Regards,

wonderful. thanks.

great to read :smiley:

Also looking forward to this. We use multi-language regularly (in other HMI products) for plants shipped worldwide with initial development done in English.

Ideal multi-language support would respect ALL CAPS vs. other cases (should not use the same translation string for “BATCH” as for “Batch”, not get messed up by punctuation in strings (ideally would auto-escape as required), and automatically fill in the dataset with all native strings (the ones it was developed with) so only the foreign localization strings had to be added. The dataset should be easily modified in an external editor.

Extra points would be the ability to add/edit translations on the fly–in other words, if a translation is missing, support prompting for translation entry in the HMI, as well as support the possibility of selecting a string in the HMI and modifying its translation.