CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wpflocalization
Jason
Jason

Reputation: 1105

Localizing system menu control tooltips

I'm working on a multi-lingual WPF project that will be localized into many different languages. One issue we are currently having is localizing the tool tips on the minimise, maximise and close buttons. The tool tips seem to get localized when changing the OS language in Vista and Windows 7, however on XP SP3 the tool tips still appear in English even though the current OS language is set to Arabic (ar-SA) for example.

Are these tool tips controlled by the operating system or do they come from somewhere else like the .NET language pack?

UPDATE: I forgot to add, applications such as Microsoft Word and Notepad appear with localized tool tips on the same XP machine that failed to display our application's tool tips in the desired language.

The language has been changed via the Keyboards and Languages panel in intl.cpl.

UPDATE AGAIN: Installing the English version of the application on Arabic Vista also results in Arabic tool tips suggesting that the localization of these tool tips is done outside of the application. I have seen no trace of a .NET language pack on the Vista machine leading me to believe that with Vista, the tool tips are controlled by the OS. The question now is why aren't these tool tips being localized for the Arabic application being installed on Arabic XP SP3?

FURTHER UPDATE: Today I went on the XP machine and created a new WPF application out of curiosity to see what it's tool tips came out like and discovered that they were localized to Arabic; meaning that the problem with the tool tips is within the application itself. The question now is, what possible ways are there of preventing these tool tips being localized? It was suggested today that it could be the setting of the windows xml lang, however I did not get the time to test this out and can hopefully try this tomorrow.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 807

Answers (2)

Jason
Jason

Reputation: 1105

The problem is our use of some 3rd party controls. These controls do some localization that works in Vista and Win 7 but falls back to some strings in an XML file on XP for some reason.

Upvotes: 0

Fredrik Mörk
Fredrik Mörk

Reputation: 158319

The tooltip texts come from the operating system and the language will depend on the language version of the operating system. If you for instance open the Windows Explorer, the menus of that application should appear in the same language as the tooltips for Minimize/Maximize buttons.

Note that changing regional settings in the Control Panel does not affect this.

Upvotes: 1

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