Global Watch: Are We There Yet?

By Claudia Holanda

Many of you are familiar with the high-tech gadgets from the Star Trek series: the transporter, the holodeck and the tractor beam. But for those of us interested in presenting multilingual content, perhaps the most intriguing technology was the universal translator, a device that allows humans to communicate with aliens by scanning brainwave frequencies and using the results to create a basis for translation.

While Information Builders does not possess this technology nor are we aware that WebFOCUS is being used by any extraterrestrial corporation, we add international product features to every release to narrow this gap.

In release 5.3 we added data access support for Baltic and Arabic languages. The former covers users in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the latter in Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Also in the same release, WebFOCUS debuted user interfaces translated to four more languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. This was possible because of the Dynamic Language Switch feature with which users may select the language for WebFOCUS tools.

These additions have increased the list of languages supported by WebFOCUS to include those shown in Figure 1.

Afrikaans Arabic Baltic (Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian) Basque Brazilian Portuguese Croatian Cyrillic (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian) Czech Danish Dutch English Farsi Finnish French German Greek

Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Italian Japanese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Simplified Chinese Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Traditional Chinese Turkish Urdu Uzbek

Figure 1

For WebFOCUS 7.1, scheduled for release this spring, we will be stepping into another corner of the world as we add support for Thai characters. The new release also will include a long overdue feature, the DATETRAN subroutine, which enables users to customize how we display dates, times and numerical data in any language. This feature will allow our international customers to take advantage of the full range of formatting options and functions that has been available only in English.

In prior versions you would get an English date output when executing the following request:

DEFINE FILE GGORDER
LONG_DATE/wrMDtrYY = ORDER_DATE
END
TABLE FILE GGORDER
PRINT ORDER_NUMBER LONG_DATE AS 'Long Date'
BY PRODUCT_CODE
END

With the DATETRAN subroutine, you may customize the date to adapt to a specific language such as French, in which not only is the order of the month, day and year different but also there are no commas and initial capitalization in the names.

The DATETRAN is another example of how WebFOCUS is evolving to meet the needs of users around the world. Further details on the use of the DATETRAN feature will be available in the next issue of the WebFOCUS Newsletter.

Stay tuned as WebFOCUS continues its mission to reach out to new cultures and civilizations and "boldly go where no one has gone before."