For Developers

Offering a selection of available languages for your applications is a very attractive feature in today’s globally-connected economy. Microsoft's .NET platform provides an easily-leveraged framework for tackling this issue. But beyond getting your code to support the notion of multiple languages, it is unlikely that you speak every language you would like to support in your application, or that those that do and are willing to translate for you have access to Microsoft's development tools. We at Epiforge, faced with the same problem, decided to create Cicero: an application specifically designed to address this problem.

Resource-Aware

Cicero can not only read the resource files generated by Visual Studio for multilingual implementations, it can write new ones, based on your original, for each culture you wish to support and understands the implicit file name convention to which Visual Studio abides. Simply create the default string table within a resource file and send a copy of the file to your translation resource, along with a link to download Cicero. When the translator opens your resource file, Cicero will automatically create new resource files with properly formatted names when the translator adds a new culture in the Cicero interface.

Easy on the Translators

Cicero's interface is unintimidating. Your translator need simply install the application, open it, and then open the resource file you have sent them. It is then very intuitive to add new languages and provide translations for them. Cicero displays the original value and your comments for each entry in a grid display, accompanied by an area in which the translator may enter the translation. When the translator saves changes, Cicero creates additional resource files that, when sent to you, are easily dropped into your Visual Studio project in the same folder containing the original resource file. There are no conversion macros or scripts, or spreadsheets to worry about. The translator has done the work within the format Visual Studio is expecting.