RE: Multiligual Database

Dorian and Micheal,
Thanks for your help with this.
I guess at minimum I could skip the user interface and buttons but the
reports and such will need to come out in two different languages.
An example might be where we do a mail out to prospects, some are french and
some are English and as such we will need two different mail merge documents.
I was thinking I could have a language preference field for English or
French and program a macro to print based on the selection with preformatted
English or French documents.Also,I could include both language choices in my
lookups so if prospect was french checkbox then in my prior example I would
choose the Monsieur prefix from a lookup field.

As for the accents maybe the client will accept that all docs Eng or Fre
could use the same french character set. ... Does this make sense?

ps: Dorien, For your initial question, ...Beginner's Luck I guess and all
communications with client have been only in English for the last four
months. In fact, client isn't even aware of this hurdle yet but I know it
will be a factor in the future which is why I'm working on this now to
prevent a future catastrophe.

Again Thanks and I have rated all your comment's as helpfull.
--



"mscertified" wrote:

> How could you possibly design such a database without taking into account
> such a requiremnent in the first place?
> The first thing I would want to know is the text of the language law. It
> seems that would dictate your design.
> One of the problems is that you will have to switch character sets because
> the french accents will not appear in the Canadian English character set.
>
> At first guess, I would have a table to contain all text displayed in the
> application. This table would have three columns: a Key, the English text and
> the French text.
> All text displayed in the application would come from this table. However,
> you will still be left with the character set problem and the problem with
> the Microsoft error messages which will be in English unless you can somehow
> dynamically switch languages.
>
> -Dorian
>
> "Bernard Piette" wrote:
>
> > HI,
> >
> > I've designed a very complex database (60 tables x 550 fields x about 150
> > relationships) and have come up against a huge obstacle. The database is
> > curently designed completely in English but my customer is in Quebec and so
> > it needs to be bilingual. How in the world can I convert everything structure
> > and data to be in both languages. Super Simple Examples is in English we say
> > Mr. or Mrs. and in French we say M. or Mme. for men and women.
> > This is essential to follow Quebec language laws and something tells me this
> > will be a gargantuan task :-\
> >
> > Any help or pointers to scripts or anything will be much apreciated.
> >
> > ps: I posted here and muti user as I was not certain the more apropriate
> > group.
> > --
> > Bernard Piette
> >
> > --
> >
.