Hi folks,
In the previous article we knew that MetaTrader could speak our tongue language, which means we can add our own language to the languages list of MetaTrader interface.
And we knew our tool to edit/add languages is Multi Language Pack (MLP) program that shipped with MetaTrader. And we even loaded the MLP and viewed its Main window (Figure 1).
Today we are going to know everything about editing/adding languages using the MLP program.
Editing a language is a rare task because you rarely find a mistake in the translation of the shipped with MetaTrader language list.
Anyway, knowing how to edit language file will give us a good hint of how to add our new language pack.
Note: We are going to work only with the terminal project (terminal.prl) and every concept you'll learn here is a suitable for the other projects (MetaEditor.prl and LiveUpdate.prl).
Let's say we want to edit the terminal string ID 5017 which telling us the message "Account disabled" which in Spanish must to be "Cuenta desactivada".
But wait! what the terminal string means?
In terminal project you can work with three categories of interfaces:
Strings:
These are the general information texts for example the messages the terminal telling the user and the captions of the buttons etc.
Menu:
These are the menus and sub-menus captions that appear to the user, for example the Chart menu and its sub-menus.
Dialog:
These are the dialogs windows that appear to the user, for example the Options windows (Figure 2).
You find these three categories as trees under each language tree (Figure 3).
Now we can edit the string ID 5017 in the Spanish translation by going to Strings in the left tab and find the string ID 5017 in the right tab then we have to double click the text to edit it (Figure 4). Please notice in figure 4 the little tool tip above the text editor field that gives you the English translation! That's really cool!
You have to save the changes to the project by going to File menu and choose Save Project (or hit CTRL+S hot keys) and that enables you to load the project in the next time with the changes you have made.
But the changes you have made hadn't effect the MetaTrader interface yet, you have to Compile the project to make the changes take place.
To compile the project you can Click the Compile button on the toolbar (Figure 5), hitting CTRL+F9 hotkeys or you can access the same action from the Tools menu where you'll find Compile Project command.
The MLP program will compile you project and showing you this message box (Figure 6) telling you that everything is OK.
Coder Guru
www.xpworx.com