Work with multiple languages

Reports in Dinspector are multi-lingual. This means that an entire report, or parts of a report, can exist in several languages simultaneously.

Every piece of text entered into a report can be translated into any supported language. What this means is that when you have a report written in one language (English for example) and you need to present that same report in another language (Swedish perhaps), there is a button in the editor which lets to switch the active language. When you do, the following happens:

1. Every text that was previously added to the report as part of a template or a remark codeset, and for which a translation exists, is automatically switched over to the selected language. For example, the report may have a mark with a remark code 31 meaning "scratch", and it will now show as "repa" (which is the Swedish translation for that word). And in the text sheet, the header with the text "size" now says "storlek".
2. Text that has been entered manually into the report will usually have been written in just one language (English in our example). Untranslated text is shown in the original language, with a yellow symbol indicating that it is missing for the active language.

Sometimes this may be good enough – the only work that was done was changing the active language and significant parts of the report are now shown in this language. The report can now be printed and shared. Also, note that changing the active language does not cause any actual change to the object file – you have merely instructed Dinspector on how you would like to display the content.

If you need to manually translate a text into the active language, all you have to do is click the text field and enter the text. This will add the translation to the report without affecting the original language (switching back to English will display the English text the same as before). Note that since entering text into the report adds data, it needs to be an ongoing report (which is not locked). If the report you want to translate is locked, you need to first start a new report and then proceed with the editing. A consequence of this is that you can only manually translate the most recent report. It is possible that a future version of Dinspector will also let you manually translate old reports – but currently this is not supported.

Something that can happen down the line, when working on a report for an object that has several reports from before, is that you need to edit a text and discover that it has previously been translated into several languages. Your choice then is to either translate your new text into those other languages as well, or to simply delete those old translations and leave the new text untranslated.

As you may have noticed, the multi-lingual text fields each have a symbol at the end. This is the translation status indicator. It lets you know if the text exists in several languages or just one, and also if a translation exists for the active language. These are the various forms of the translation status indicator:

One dot means that the text exists only in the language currently shown, while two dots mean that the text exists in more than one language. Yellow means that the text is missing for the active language. Clicking the translation status indicator for a text pops up a box displaying all the existing translations.