A fair proportion (probably about 25%) of the publishing work I do on the Arc is in Welsh. Due to the accented characters already available in the fonts, I can write in Welsh with little extra effort using the <ALT>-keypad method or one of the many special character pickers. Certain characters such as the rarely-used 'y-circumflex' and 'w-circumflex' are not available, but they can be put together using Impression's easy kerning facilities.
Spelling is much more of a problem. I am building up a user dictionary with only Welsh in it, but the spelling module refuses to allow accented characters as part of words, and words with kerned circumflexes are treated as two words, split at the circumflex. If anyone knows a solution to this problem (other than just not spell-checking documents that include Welsh) perhaps they could let me know?
As a silly excercise, and because I found out how easy it was, I decided to translate Impression into Welsh. If you <SHIFT>-double-click on the !Impress icon you will open up the directory, and inside you will find (amongst other things) a directory called 'Resources'. Inside this directory is a text file called 'uk' which contains all the text for all the menus and messages that Impression uses.
Provided that your translation is roughly the same length as the original, it is no problem (albeit a lengthy task) to translate these messages into any other language. The one exception that I have found so far is that the first entry in the main menu (the one you get by pressing <MENU> in a document window) seems to set the width of the menu on screen.
The translation of 'Document' which is the first entry in the English version is 'Dogfen' (pronounced 'dog-ven') in Welsh, which is two characters shorter. The reduction in width of the menu meant it was impossible to access other menus by sliding off the edge. This was solved with a couple of <ALT><SPACE>s.
You will notice that I have not translated absolutely everything. This is partly because it is difficult to find suitable Welsh words (many of the more obscure terms turn out to be very much longer than their English counterparts), and partly because since the spelling checker is English, I thought most of its dialogues should be too.
If you decide to alter your 'uk' file remember to keep a copy of the original!
