D. Building localization resources

Multi-language support is another feature of our software, necessary for its applicability in different countries. As mentioned in Section III and shown in Figure 2, multi-language support is an integral part of the EHR meta data model, which enables translation on every definition level. Currently, we support two ways of defining translation resources: translation incorporated into a model and translation defined in a separate external file. In the first approach, a power user defines translation values for different languages in the class EHRMetaModel. Since this multi-language support is fixed during design-time, it is not very efficient. Therefore, the second approach, based on external XML or Microsoft Excel XLS files, is more flexible. In this approach, our generator tool creates a translation XML or XLS file that lists all strings (e.g., “[.#Echo.]” unique label identifier) that can be translated and power users then enter translation terms in different languages (e.g., “???” in Serbian Cyrillic script, “Eho” in Serbian Latin script, “Echo” in English) into this file. We have posted on our project’s Web page [2] a figure showing an XLS translation file where names of strings properties and translation terms for 3 languages are in different columns and each row corresponds to translation of a single string. If there is no translation term in a particular language, the name of the string property is used by default.

These translation resources are used during form generation. Each form can be defined either as a single language form or as a form supporting labels in multiple languages (one of which is chosen during run-time). For a single language form, labels are fixed during the generation process to terms (in the chosen language) defined within the translation resource. For forms supporting multiple languages at run-time, the generation process represents each label with a unique identifier (in the first column of a translation resource file) and embeds all available translations for these labels into a resource added into the .NET library containing the generated form. At run-time, one language is selected and unique label identifiers are replaced with corresponding terms from this language.

Figure 10. Translation resource defined in Excel XLS file