Language support in RIMMF2

In RIMMF2, we now offer the option to display the RDA Element names in your templates in the languages currently (as of June 2013) supported by the RDA Toolkit (thank you, ALA Editions!).

To change the language of the RDA element names, follow these steps:

1. From the main menu, select: Options|Setup|Set language

2. On the resulting pop-up form, select the language of your choice and press Save:

The new language immediately comes into effect and stays in effect until you close RIMMF.

When RIMMF is restarted, the default language (English) will be used.

If you want your choice to become the new default, then additionally select the option

[ ] Always load this language when RIMMF starts

at the bottom of the form.

Of course, you might also want to have the instructions themselves display in your chosen language; for help with switching the language for the RDA rules, see the Multilingual RDA instructions provided here.

The rest of this page describes how we tried to implement language support in RIMMF1¹⁾.

In RIMMF, when we speak of the default tables, we mean the lists of elements and vocabulary terms that are distributed with the program. For example, when you use RIMMF to design a template, the element labels that appear are taken from an 'elements' table; or when you edit a record in RIMMF, and click on an element linked to a vocabulary (like Language of the Expression, RDA Content Type, etc.), the list of terms that pops up is taken from a 'terms' table.

RIMMF supports two types of customization to these tables:

• Changes (eg. when you change the label of an existing element)
• Additions (eg. when you add a caption or element to a template)

RIMMF tracks each type of customization separately.

First, please note that all of the element labels and vocabulary terms used by RIMMF are completely customizable. You may rewrite them in any language you want, or simply rephrase the distributed English labels to your liking.

For the latter purpose, no special steps are needed. Open the element editor, locate the element that you want to modify, and type your changes into the 'Element Label' box:

When you are done press 'Apply' and exit the element editor. The new label will immediately appear in any new record or template:

If you are going to customize the tables in a serious manner, then you should be aware (in the current state of things, which we hope will be improved in the future) of the following:

If you are going to customize RIMMF to work in another language, you may use the steps above but we recommend another approach.

First, go to the Tools|Setup menu and select the option for 'Language Code'. In the form that pops up, enter the language code for the language that you want to work with. If you want to setup a code for:

• Spanish, enter es
• German, enter de
• French, enter fr

There is a link to a list of ISO-639-1 codes if you need to look yours up.

Once you have made the change, press 'save'.

RIMMF will then tell you that it has made tables for your new language and will then close itself. The next time that RIMMF starts, it will use the tables for the new language.

These tables for the new language are simply copies of the distributed English tables. But now when you make changes to them, all of the changes you make will be saved in a separate place, unlike the first method referred to above (which simply overwrites the English labels in the English tables). And thus, your language changes will never be overwritten by an update to the default tables.

So this is a better way to go about it, both for organizational purposes, and for data backup.

Once you have followed these steps, there is not great deal more to learn. We have practised this functionality ourselves and found that, using google translator, one might translate the set of labels for the Person entity in French, or Spanish, or German fairly quickly²⁾. We are not making any claims about the accuracy of the translation, just trying to give you an idea of how long the basic input process might take in RIMMF. Of course, if you have your translations already prepared, it would take much less time.

Here is what we came up with in our little test based on the Person entity:

French	Spanish

The same general steps may be repeated to customize vocabulary terms.

Open the vocabulary editor. Select the vocabulary that you want to translate, for example, 'RDA Content Type':

Switch over to the 'Terms' page of the form, and simply begin typing over the terms you want to translate.

Notes

The reason why RIMMF must be restarted after a change to the language code is so that it can reload its tables.

In RIMMF, all tables are prefixed with an ISO-639-1 code. So if you have a peek in your 'tables' folder, you will see a bunch of files with names like:

en rda + tmq elements
en rda + tmq terms
en rda + tmq vocabs

and so on; and if you add a new language, as we did in the example for Polish above, you will additionally see:

pl rda + tmq elements
pl rda + tmq terms
pl rda + tmq vocabs

Whenever a language code is changed, the program makes a note of the new code, closes it self, and then loads the tables for that code the next time it starts.