{"id":7123,"date":"2012-07-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/07\/16\/how-much-gets-localized-in-a-localized-version-of-windows\/"},"modified":"2012-07-16T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T07:00:00","slug":"how-much-gets-localized-in-a-localized-version-of-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120716-00\/?p=7123","title":{"rendered":"How much gets localized in a localized version of Windows?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ErikF wonders, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2011\/03\/22\/10144082.aspx#10145295\">Do the localized versions of Windows translate these weird, out of the way resources<\/a>? My guess is &#8220;no&#8221;, but I don&#8217;t have a localized copy of Windows to look at right now.&#8221;\n There are two questions here.\n The first question is &#8220;What content is in scope for localization?&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Everything in the resources of a DLL is in scope. <\/li>\n<li>Registry keys are not in scope.     They can&#8217;t be, because different users on a machine can have     different preferred languages, but there is only one registry.     To work around this, the registry uses     <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/dd374120(VS.85).aspx\">     string redirection<\/a> for anything that needs to be localized. <\/li>\n<li>File names used to be in scope, because there was no facility for     displaying a file to the user with a name different from its     physical name.     <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/11\/04\/10085797.aspx\">     That changed in Windows 2000<\/a>,     and the decision to switch completely to MUI-style file names     was made in Windows Vista. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> The next question is, &#8220;Of everything in scope, how much of it actually gets translated?&#8221;\n Historically, the answer has been &#8220;All of it.&#8221; Not just the stuff you might expect, like strings and dialog boxes, but other stuff like <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/08\/17\/10050774.aspx\"> animations<\/a>. As you can imagine, translating every single string and dialog box (and possibly also bitmaps and animations) is an enormous undertaking.\n Windows Vista mixed this up a bit by introducing <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/goglobal\/bb688177.aspx\"> Language Interface Packs<\/a>, which are &#8220;mostly-localized&#8221; versions of Windows. Each Language Interface Pack starts with one of the &#8220;fully-localized&#8221; versions, and then re-translates a subset of the resources to suit the target language. Strings left untranslated receive the translation from the base language.<\/p>\n<p> Michael Kaplan appears to have quite a supply of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/michkap\/archive\/tags\/lip_2f00_mui\/\"> LIP-related puns<\/a>, which he dips into whenever a new LIP is released. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ErikF wonders, &#8220;Do the localized versions of Windows translate these weird, out of the way resources? My guess is &#8220;no&#8221;, but I don&#8217;t have a localized copy of Windows to look at right now.&#8221; There are two questions here. The first question is &#8220;What content is in scope for localization?&#8221; Everything in the resources of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-7123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>ErikF wonders, &#8220;Do the localized versions of Windows translate these weird, out of the way resources? My guess is &#8220;no&#8221;, but I don&#8217;t have a localized copy of Windows to look at right now.&#8221; There are two questions here. The first question is &#8220;What content is in scope for localization?&#8221; Everything in the resources of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}