The Translations manager is for viewing, editing and/or translating all interface texts in your Collections system in one overview (except for the Help texts). The data in your database cannot be accessed this way. The files that can be opened in this tool are application structure files (.pbk), database structures (.inf), screen files (.fmt) and system text files (.txt). From these files, the texts you can edit and/or translate are message texts, button and screen field/box labels, enumeration texts, method (access point) texts, data source list texts, screen titles, application titles, and field names. All these texts can be edited or translated into as many languages as you wish to make available to users. If text files are in Unicode, you can make translations to all languages supported by Unicode. Editing these texts for existing applications and database tables is no problem: the functioning of your Collections system is not dependent on these texts*. Your only real consideration should be that the length of screen field labels is often limited by the screen layout; this means you need to check (for instance in your running application) if new label texts still fit in the space that is available for it.

* You can always add translations of field names to your existing database tables without getting into trouble and usually you can also change existing field name translations safely, as long as you don't touch the existing English translations. This is because the English field names can (and may already) be used in different configuration files for the WebAPI and other Axiell tools, in XSLT stylesheets for different purposes or in Word templates. (Designer properties which may contain tags as well as field names do always store the tag, not any displayed field name.)

The texts you edit here, can of course also be edited in the files from which they have been extracted, in the Screen editor, the Application browser or text editors. And naturally, the changes you save here, will be reflected in those files when you open them in their proprietary tools. The advantages of editing texts in one overview in the Translations manager are that you no longer have to find out in which file certain texts to be translated are located, and that you no longer have to do extensive navigating through nested options to edit just a few lines of text. In the overview you can easily find any text in any file, all at once: just sort on a column of your choice and scroll to the texts you are searching for.

See also

Accessing the Translations manager

Editing or translating Adlib interface texts

Saving modifications