Beth Kirshner
I've taken some time to review the following applications for translating and updating resource property bundles:
- Eclipse ResourceBundle Editor Plugin (http://resourcebundleeditor.com/ess/rbe/home.do)
- Properties Editor (http://propedit.sourceforge.jp/index_en.html)
- ResourceProperties editor (http://sourceforge.net/projects/i18nedit)
Of these three, the last one, in my humble opinion, far outshines the rest. The ResourceProperties editor:
- Keeps track of changes to the default bundle, and highlights those changes needed in the target language
- Users can enter UTF-8 characters and they are automatically ascii- encoded when the file is saved
- Platform-independent java application
- Documentation is available at http://i18nedit.sourceforge.net/ userdoc/
Like any application, it does have some annoyances. Loading a large project like Sakai takes a fair amount of time, though response time is reasonable after the project is loaded. It creates *.metaprops files throughout your source tree (which is how it keeps track of changes to each field in each property file), that may have to be carried forward to future releases if the translator wants to be alerted to changes in default text. It requires the user to step through the directory tree to discover each property file (I'd kind of like to see an auto-expand feature, though it is an open source project, hmmm).
I believe this tool could offer translators a more elegant solution than the currently document process of MS Excel spreadsheet exports and shell scripts. Let me know if you have any comments – for now I'm going to up date confluence with these thoughts.