STEM National Language Support

Supported Languages

With Release V1.2.1 STEM now has National Language Support (NLS).

As of 7/28/2011 The following Language Translations have been implemented:

• Chinese (Simplified)
• German
• Korean

If you download the STEM Application and your computer is configured for one of these supported languages you should see STEM in your native language. If your machine is configured to a language for which we have not yet released the required NLS property files, the STEM user interface will default to English.

We have several other translations in progress and in the very near future will be releasing NLS translations for:

• Spanish
• Swedish

As an open source project, these translations were done voluntarily by native language speakers contributing to STEM. If you would like to volunteer to contribute additional translations please contact the developers. Please note that we have created NLS property files for many more languages using automated translation services but these services are not accurate enough and we need native language speakers to edit and correct them.

Language Configuration For Developers

Users will automatically see STEM in supported languages if their operating system is configured for that language. No special action is required.

For developers wishing to toggle between languages, or for developers testing new NLS properties files, it is easy to change your Eclipse Development environment to see the STEM translations.

1. Open you Run Configurations dialog.
2. Click on the Eclipse Application target for stem.product
3. Click on the Arguments tab.

You should see a Program Argument setting

-nl ${target.nl} 

as shown in the screenshot below.

We recommend that you duplicate the stem.product run configuration to create a second one for testing the new language (this makes it easy for toggle back and forth). In the new run configuration simple change the Program Argument shown above to use the proper two letter code for your new target language. For example, the target code for German is de. The new setting should be

-nl de

You may find a listing of ISO 639-1 codes here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes and read more about internationalization here http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Internationalization/how2I18n.html

If you want to work on NLS please be aware of two things. 1) The resource bundle files (typically with names like messages_de.properties or plugin_de.properties) must be saved as utf-8 formatted files. 2) The strings within these files must be saved as unicode. This is a Java problem (or Java feature :-). As a result, special characters and fonts are not human readable within the nls properties files. For example, the Unicode Character for

'GREEK SMALL LETTER PI' = U+03C0

We will soon be implementing Eclipse Babel ( http://www.eclipse.org/babel/ ). This will provide a unicode editor and other tools to assist in creating and maintaining our translations.