Translation Manager

The Translation Manager lets you see and edit all of the global translations in one place. It is a view into Ignition's "term database". From this screen, you can add new languages, create terms, import and export translations, and most importantly, edit translations.

Ignition Translation works by maintaining a central database of terms. These terms, by default, are defined in English. In various parts of the system (mainly Vision windows and components), the term database is consulted for the current user's language, and if a translation is present, it is returned. Otherwise, the base term is used.

Changes made to translations are saved immediately to the gateway and are sent to all clients and designers.

The panel on the left hand side of the screen shows the defined languages, and lets you select which of them should be included in the translation display to the right. To add a language, click on the "Add Language" button on the right side of the language list.

New base terms can be added by clicking on the "Add Term" button on the right side of the translations table, or by hitting "CTRL-N". A text area will slide up, allowing you to enter the new term.

Terms can also be deleted, though it is important to remember that since translations are global, the term may be in use anywhere in any project.

Translations, or base terms, can be exported for external translation in a variety of formats. When you click the "Export Terms" button to the right of the translation table, a screen is displayed that lets you select which languages are exported, whether to include all terms or only those selected, and which format to use.

With most formats, the result will be a file per language. Therefore, the path is specified as a folder + base name, as opposed to a single file name. For example, if you export in XML format to the "all_terms" base file name, you might end up with "all_terms_en.xml" for the english alternate translations, "all_terms_es.xml" for spanish, and so on.

On import, terms will first be displayed with their translations. You may choose to import all terms, or to only select the specific terms that you want to include.

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"Properties" - This is the basic name/value property file format, where the keys are on the left, and the translations are on the right. This format is particularly difficult in that unicode characters are not directly supported and must be be in ascii-escaped form, though the native2ascii tool available from Oracle can help handle this.

•	XML - This format is the XML encoding of the properties file format. An entry is provided for each key, with the translation being the element value. This format supports UTF-8, and is therefore a little easier to work with than the normal property file format.

There are several settings that can be used to modify how translation lookup occurs. Normally, lookup is a direct comparison between the incoming text and the defined keys. However, subtle differences, such as the addition of a trailing space, or the difference between a capital starting character and a lower cased one can cause the lookup to fail. The various lookup options can help smooth over some of these difficulties.

To modify the settings, click on the setting icon on the right hand side of the Translation Manager screen. The options are:

•	Ignore whitespace - differences in white space (space, tab, new line) will not lead to lookup failure.

•	Ignore punctuation - punctuation differences will not be taken into account.

•	Ignore capitalization - upper cased and lower cased letters will be treated the same.

•	Ignore markup - Tag based markup in the text will be ignored for lookup purposes. For example, "<html><b>Click Here" on a button would also match for another button that was simply "Click Here".

It is important to remember that these settings can have a significant effect on the way terms overlap, and enabling them after many translations have been entered can cause a loss of some translations, if previously distinct terms now overlap.

For example, two terms that look very different, such as "Start Machine" and "START_MACHINE" (the latter likely being a code term, used in conjunction with a base language translation) would match and lead to the same translation if punctuation and capitalization were ignored. If there were previously two different translations, only one would ultimately be loaded.