And now... Multi-lingual customizations

Recently faced with the task of ensuring my add-in (VEM) was usable in at least the most common international languages, I explored further on the GoogleAPI theme and wrote a very small simple utility for adding translations to the MSCRM4 customizations file.

http://www.vizola.com/vem/TranslateXML

This means you can do a customizations export from a system having only (say) 1033 - US English, then add the translations using this utility, and re-import into a another system using a different language or multiple languages. It's somewhat quicker than using the built-in translations export/import process!!!

Do keep in mind that we're using 'machine' translation here so the result will ideally be sanity-checked by a real person :-)

This utility translates from/to english, german, french, italian, dutch and spanish. As long as you have at least one of these to start, it will fill in the gaps as needed.

One thing I found however, is that MSCRM will NOT 'back-fill' any new translations (which is a real pain!) - this means that if say custom entity/attributes already exist in a single language, you need to delete them (together with any data) before you can import the multi-lingual versions. Making a utility to work with the CrmTranslations.xml might not be so easy!

BTW, the GoogleAPI currently offers about 40 languages so adding/changing the current set is pretty easy. And if anyone wants the simple source just email me.