Report Language Dictionary (Dictionary.xml)

The language dictionary contains the text for translating English to a foreign language. The language dictionary is divided into sections to translate menus, dialogs, messages, and enumerations. In the future, GenoPro will include built-in language dictionaries, so a report may utilize one of those dictionary by specifying the Language attribute in the configuration file.

If you are creating a new report in a foreign language, you need to translate the enumerations so the report generator can display the proper text for enumerated values. An enumeration is a textual name representing a collection of possible values such as a gender or a cause of death.

<Dictionary>

This is the root node of the dictionary file, as required by the XML standard. GenoPro assumes UTF-8 (Unicode) if the encoding is not specified in the file.

Language:
At the moment, this attribute is not used by GenoPro, however it is useful to specify the correct language for troubleshooting. In the future GenoPro will use the Language attribute to chain dictionaries together. In other words, a dictionary will be able to "include" another dictionary, so there will be no need to have redundant translation.

<Authors>
Brief history of each author having modified the dictionary file. The purpose of this list is to give credit to the contributor(s) and provide a method to communicate with them if necessary. If you modify the language dictionary, add your name at the end of the list. If you are writing a new skin from scratch, remove "GenoPro" from the author list.

Author Name:
Name of the author having modified the language dictionary. This could be your given name, your alias or the name of your corporation. GenoPro will display the last entry in the author list as the author of the dictionary. In the future, the same language dictionary may be shared by multiple skins, so it is recommended you enter your name to both the dictionary and the configuration file.

DateFirstModified and DateLastModified:
A rough idea when the author started translating the dictionary as well as the time he/she made the last update. Those values may overlap as multiple authors may translate the same dictionary. There may be gaps where nobody translated the file. In the future, GenoPro may display those values, but in the meantime those values are purely informative to the people translating the the file.

Author Contact:
Contact information of the author. It is recommend not to use your email address because of spam, and the likelihood your email address becomes invalid. It is better to include your home page as contact information because you can include your email address to your website. Other contact information may be your street address if you really want to. If you wish to retain your privacy, leave this field blank.

Author Comment:
This is a comment describing what was translated in the dictionary. The comment may be the name of a new enumeration that was added since the previous version, or a corrected typo. It is highly recommend to write your comment in English. The language dictionary is a translation from English to another language, so it is assumed the reader does have basic understanding of English. Eventually GenoPro will keep a list of available dictionaries for download, so it will help us to provide comments in English as we may need to merge XML files to keep the master dictionary up-to-date.

<Enumerations>

At the moment, this is the only section of interest for translating a report. Each enumeration has a name, so it can be shared by multiple data fields. One example is the Date which is shared for the birth, death, anniversary, and so on. To translate an enumeration, just modify the content of the T attribute. If an element is missing, GenoPro will use the English text. This way, you do not need to translate everything at once and/or GenoPro can add new features to GenoPro without discarding your work.

The attribute name _Blank is reserved for an element without a name. For instance, GenoPro did not assigned a name for the element "unknown gender". GenoPro could have used the name "U", however the decision was made to not export the value "unknown gender". Consequently, any individual without an explicit gender (M, F, P) is interpreted as "unknown gender". GenoPro displays the question mark (?) in the genealogy tree, however internally the gender enumeration is unassigned. If you want to specify text for a nameless element, you have to use the _Blank attribute.

Tip:
Each enumeration can be found in the Tag Definitions dialog (Menu -> Tools -> Tag Definitions). Double-click on the enumeration, and GenoPro will "copy" the enumeration into the XML format to the clipboard. All you have to do is paste it and translate the text. This will save you great time, in addition to provide you the complete enumeration.

<ReportGenerator>

This section is used by the report generator. You are welcome to include any text that is subject to translation. In theory, all the text for a report could be stored in this section, so translating a report to a foreign language would require only to translate the sections <Enumerations> and <ReportGenerator>. This has not been done yet because of time constraints. Once the report generator has matured, GenoPro will offer a true "generic report" where all the text will be in the language dictionary.

Usage:
To access a value from the language dictionary, use the LanguageDictionary object.

Special Keywords:
Any keyword starting with the underscore (_) character has a special meaning for GenoPro.

Performance Notes:
Both the <Enumerations> and the <ReportGenerator> sections are designed to handle   large amount of entries without affecting speed performance.