> I have one more question - Chinese and Korean seem to be the only > stickers on this one. However I installed the east asian language support > for XP. I then went to BabelFish and translated Hello into Chinese simp, and > then copy/pasted into Flash. Worked a treat - where before I installed > support it just pasted rubbish. The swf shows the chinese properly on > another machine in the office as well - a Vista machine. Haven't tried it > elsewhere but so far so good. Any tips here are most appreciated.
It's essential that you use a Unicode font--I use Arial Unicode for Asian languages, because it has all the languages I typically need. Embed the font, of course. I've done a lot of localization, and I can tell you a couple things you will find regarding size. English is a fairly compact language, and Romanic languages will expand about 10% over English. German will expand the most, up to 150% the size of the English. There's no hard and fast rule for Asian languages, but Chinese and Korean tend to be more compact, and Japanese the least. That's partly because the Japanese use three character sets--Chinese (kanji), katakana, and hiragana. You will probably find Roman characters in the Asian languages, too--numerals, if nothing else. Other than the occasional Roman character, Chinese uses only the Chinese ideograms, and Korean uses mostly Hangul, a phonetic script, though you will sometimes find Chinese characters in Korean as well. Be sure you have a native-level speaker proof your work. Even if the translation is correct, string methods like split(), join(), substr(), and the like can trip you up. I lost a job once because I spotted some errors in the Chinese version in the GMC candidate stage--errors caused by string splitting. It wasn't even my code, but the owner was furious with me because I made his company look bad. I guess they would have rather let the client ship an error-filled product rather than look bad. Can't say I was too unhappy to leave that company. Cordially, Kerry Thompson _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
