Acorn tries to enter the German market and afterwards wants to attack other European areas, where English isn't the local language. In this context foreign language translations of software increases in significance, because it can't be assumed that a 'average user' is able to understand all details of a program in a foreign language. This is taken into account by more and more software houses, offering their software in German language now. They usually have the money and time to translate programs and documentation - at least together with local dealers.
Normal programmers who offer their programs for free or a small amount of money can't afford to translate them - in addition to that very few are able to speak more than two languages. They depend on others to translate their programs. This way a program can be translated into many different languages step by step and therefore become valuable for an increasing amount of people all over Europe (or the world).
Acorn founded the idea of translating programs into other languages without having access to the sources with their Messages and Templates principle. Unfortunately it normally isn't possible to have more than one language active without renaming files or changing !Run files or the like. Other languages distributed with the program have to be put elsewhere, eg. in files with an appended nation sign or in different subdirectories. What is missing is a standard to where to put the different language files and to activate the user's natural language without changing any file of the application in any way. A program distributed with resources in English, German and French should start in the appropriate language in these countries - presumed a computer configured the right way - without having the end user to manipulate the application. Additionally, users in countries, which can't be configured on RISC OS (yet), should be able to use the application in a language fitting their abilities best - without configuring each program.
At least there should be a possibility to force a program to a language, eg. if the program's translation to the user's preferred language is bad.
All these problems are solved by ResFind (for 'Resources Finder') with nearly no additional expense for the programmer. All he has to do is to build a simple directory structure to put the resources into and to use a path variable instead of the usual directory prefix in his program to access the resources. This path variable is set up by ResFind which should be called in the applications !Run file and !Help file. Please read the documentation about ResFind for further information about how this is handled.
To get most out of ResFind it may be necessary to set up some system variables. Because not everybody is into changing the system !Boot file by hand, especially if it is set up by a tool like MakeBoot, the installation of this variables is done by the utility ResInstall. Installing the system variable should only be necessary once. For further details read the documentation, please.
To sell bigger amounts of Acorn machines it is necessary to free Acorn from it's 'freak image'. Therefore it is important to offer programs in the user's own language, not only software from professional software houses but from hobby programmers as well. ResFind will help to reach this goal and offers a standard way to do. Please contribute to this goal and use ResFind for your programs.
