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The VolanoChat product contains translations of the user interface text for English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. To translate the VolanoChat applet user interface text into other Western languages, simply edit one of the applet property files to create your own new translation. The VolanoChat applet property files are described in the Properties section of the VolanoChat Applet chapter.
This page describes the additional steps that may be required in order to translate the VolanoChat user interface text into non-Western languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Before testing your translation of the VolanoChat applet, you should verify that your browser has support in Java for a full Unicode font or at least for a font containing your own local character set. The Java applet below shows characters on the right taken from the language or alphabet name listed to their left.
Applet 9.1: Sample Unicode characters.
If you see characters correctly representing the required language or
alphabet, your browser is already configured to support the translation.
If some of the required characters do not appear at all, show up as
boxes, show up as question marks, or show up as special symbols (such as
!"#$%&'()*), you will need to upgrade to the latest Web
browser support as described below.
In order to view non-Western characters correctly from within Java applets in Netscape Communicator, you need to run Version 4.06 or later. To install the correct support, follow the steps below:
If you are running an earlier version of Netscape Communicator, download and install Version 4.06 or later from Netscape's Free Software Upgrade page by clicking the following button:
After upgrading to Version 4.06 or later, check the applet at the top of this page to see whether you can view the characters correctly. If not, you can continue with the following step.
If you want to be able to see any characters in Java applets (not just the characters of your local region and language), download and install the free Cyberbit Unicode Font from Bitstream.
After those changes, you should be able to see all of the characters of the world's languages in your Java applets running under Netscape Communicator. For more information, see Netscape's Information for International Users. Additional information about setting up different fonts for use by Java applets can be found from Netscape's Improving International Font Support for JDK 1.1.
Although Microsoft Internet Explorer does not support Unicode fonts in 100% Pure Java™ applets like VolanoChat, you should have no trouble viewing the characters of your local region and language when using VolanoChat. In other words, if you have an American English version of Windows 95, you probably won't be able to see Japanese characters represented correctly in applets running under Internet Explorer, but a Japanese version of Windows 95 will see them just fine.
In any case, for the best results you'll still need the latest version of Internet Explorer. You can get the latest version from the Microsoft Internet Explorer Products Download page by clicking the following button:
If you're already running Internet Explorer 4.0, you can get the latest version and components by selecting the Help, Product Updates menu item in the browser, or by visiting Internet Explorer 4.0 Components.
There are two files that the VolanoChat server administrator may need to have translated:
english.txt
vcclient
subdirectory by default.
rooms.txt
vchat2.0.0 directory by
default.
If you translate either of these files into a language that uses
non-Western characters, you need to convert the file into an ASCII
representation of its Unicode values. Fortunately, Java provides a tool
to do the conversion in the 1.1 release of the Java Development Kit.
The tool is called the
Native-to-ASCII Converter,
and you run it with the native2ascii command. The tool
converts a file with native-encoded characters (characters which are not
Latin 1 or Unicode) to one with Unicode-encoded characters.
For example, to convert a VolanoChat applet property file called
japanese.jis, containing Japanese (EUC-JP encoded)
characters, to a format understood by the VolanoChat applet, enter the
command:
native2ascii -encoding EUCJIS japanese.jis japanese.txt
This command takes each character in the japanese.jis
file and converts it into an ASCII representation of its Unicode value.
The converted result is placed in the file japanese.txt.
To find out your local file encoding, look in the support log file
generated when you start the VolanoChat server. By default the file is
called support.log and is located in the
vchat2.0.0 directory. For example, on an American English
Windows NT system the file contains:
server.version = Version 2.0.0 Build 148 server.license = VolanoChatPro - 5 connection limit server.expiration = Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 PDT 1998 server.host = red.volano.com (192.168.0.2) server.port = 8000 java.vendor = Sun Microsystems Inc. java.vendor.url = http://www.sun.com/ java.version = 1.1.6 java.class.version = 45.3 java.compiler = symcjit os.name = Windows NT os.version = 4.0 os.arch = x86 user.language = en user.region = US file.encoding = 8859_1 file.encoding.pkg = sun.io
specifying a file encoding of 8859_1.
The Native-to-ASCII Converter
page lists all of the file encodings supported by Java.
Once you have converted your translated files into their canonical ASCII representation, you can transfer the files to whatever machine is running your VolanoChat server, regardless of the server's native region, language, or file encoding. In this way you can have American servers providing Russian applet interfaces, or Chinese servers providing applet interfaces in Hebrew. Make sure to transfer the converted files in ASCII if you're using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program.
For more information about Java, fonts, and internationalization in general, please see the following pages:
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