How to manage localized strings that look alike in C#/WPF?

Question

In my application (and probably in lots of other applications) I want to use localization. However, I don't know what is the best way to manage almost equal string.

Some questions:

1. When a button 'Edit' is used as menu name, menu item name should I make two resource strings (with equal value "Edit") or only 1?
2. When there is an edit button on the screen and I want to use the Alt key the strings needs to be "_Edit", should I make for this a separate resource string ?
3. And what if there is also a button that shows a new page, and thus (for my convention), the value should be "_Edit..."?

Answer 1

1) You should favor abstraction and decoupling : you have two concepts : a category "edition" and an action "edit", so it makes sense to have two separate strings, because in other languages than English "edit/edit" could not be as acceptable.

2) Here you have only one concept with two different formats, so only one string and a transformation rule ("_" + myString) make sense.

3) It depends : is the action triggered by this button the exact same concept as the one above : if yes use the same string, if no use two.

All this are general considerations and you should of course adapt it to your needs :

• if you really have to support n languages upfront then follow these guidelines, and they should have appeared naturally during the localization process

• if you are anticipating that somewhere in the future you may have to support another language than English and that you have a lot of identical strings now then you might not spend too much time trying to do things perfectly as there is a lot of chances it will be for nothing and time could be spent better enhancing or adding core features.

Answer 2

It's not a quick answer topic (localization) but I'll try to answer at least to your questions:

1) Yes, even if not mandatory it's better to keep each text separated. If you'll change one of them you won't risk to change both (and maybe in different languages they must be translated with something different because of their context).

2) Absolutely yes. Imagine you have these strings: _Edit and _Mark as read. In Italian, for example, they'll be translated to _Modifica and Segna come già letto. For both strings you can't add use "_" for the same letter, this is an issue that translators should take care about.

3) I suggest no. As for 1) try to keep different strings separated (for the same reason I said before). If you want to save money of translation (who doesn't want?) you may write a program to pre-parse strings to produce a "normalized" output to give to translators (it'll remove duplicates and merge similar strings, when possible). But you should keep your program unaware of details.

To summarize: no, don't try to merge (similar) strings inside your program. If you really need it then it'll be done with an external program (it can even take into account strings from different modules so it'll do a better job) and only when applicable (for case 3 it's possible, for case 1 and 2 absolutely not).

Answer 3

Yes you should make separate resource strings. You are using the word edit to describe different actions in your application in english. However, in another language these actions might be described by different words (one might be "edit" while the other one might be "change"). So you'll need the ability to assign different strings for your menus and buttons.