What language comes back when qm file is loaded?

[ZikO]

To be honest, I read your first post again and I would provide the same answers, with some exceptions perhaps. The post is confusing. The second post is even more confusing. I've done a lot of tests using different languages not exactly European / American but others as well and I am happy with the results. Obviously, in a multilingual application, you are almost forced to be aware of many things, much more than while coding application in English for English. Well, as you claimed for someone of much stronger expertise in this area, It's nothing more to say but good luck.

[ChrisW67]

What language does the user "see" while typing into the line edit?
What languge is returned when you call text()?

The translation files translate static text, such as your label, in your program to another language that a reader can understand. This has nothing at all to do with the characters (not language) that are entered into a text box by the operating system when a user types. These strings are returned to you by Qt as the Unicode encoding of the characters the user typed. The characters (actually glyphs) the user sees in the text box are exactly the characters the user would be expecting to see. If they are using a machine with the operating system set for a Turkish keyboard then when they press the lower case dotless i key they see a dotless i, "ı" and a Unicode dotless i character (U+0131) is returned in the text(). If they type the words "hoşça kal" into a text box that is what Qt will give you: it will not magically be translated to English as "goodbye", "bye-bye", "cheerio", "goodday", or even the French loan word "adieu" regardless of translation files. If that same user, on the same machine, switches the keyboard input to US English then types they will expect to see the English alphabet and glyphs when they type "goodbye". The user has the choice of how their keyboard functions and to force it can be downright counter-productive (think about typing a Hebrew sentence referring to a person with an English name).

If you have a need to store a native language version of a proper name and an Anglicised or romanised version of the name then you have two or more names, you need to store both, and the user will have to give you both as names are routinely romanised differently by different people. For example, someone with the Greek name "ΣτÎ*φανος" might be given the name in English of "Stephen" or "Steven" (or even use the phonetic "Stephanos"). The problem is not limited to two options: "Москва" (ru), "Moscow" (en), "Moscou" (fr), "Moskova" (tr) are all the same city. For some things, like countries, there are international standard codes that can used to partly ameliorate the problem. For similarly limited vocabularies lookup tables can be a workable solution. Some fuzzy matching techniques will also be useful picking up "Stephen" when given "Steven."

For system user names you can opt to limit the character set permitted in the name, use another identifier such email address that is similarly limited, allow native characters on the understanding that your technical support people are going to be native speakers, or use a meaningless identifier like an id number (1234).

[RolandHughes]

Thank you for your reply. This is exactly the kind of catastrophe I was expecting.

The problem is even worse for computers sold in the Asian community in the United states. One of my favorite Chinese buffet type places had one on the bar. It would switch between English and Japanese when you bumped the mouse pointer into a certain region of the screen border. (I know how that sounds, but it really was a Chinese buffet owned by a Japanese family). I suspect there is a large number of these multi-lingual type setups at least in the United States.

Thanks again.
Roland