„Schön dass du da bist!“ « Bienvenue chez moi ! » “¡Bienvenido en mi sitio web!” If you are running a non-English website, you will be glad to hear that it is now possible to use the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit in your own language; over 40 languages are supported. Siebe Tolsma, Software Development Engineer in the Messenger Web Platform team, states:
We are very excited to announce that in total over 40 new languages are available for the UI Controls, as well as greatly improving support for right-to-left languages! Because localization is such a hip new feature, we have also decided to update the version of the library to 3.1.
Sounds interesting—And how can I use these new features?
- Locate the following HTML code in your website source:
- Replace the 3.0 with 3.1.
- Now check your HTML document type.
- Are you using HTML 4? Then add the parameter “lang”, like this:
Using XHTML?
- Remember you should also set the reading direction property “dir”, if you are planning to use a right-to-left language, like Hebrew.
I am sure that localization will help many users to make use of the Messenger Web Toolkit, as English is not the primarily used language of Messenger users.
On a side note, the update to version 3.1 also fixes some minor bugs, like CSS incompatibilities. If you find that some of the translated strings are wrong or difficult to understand, please leave a comment and we will forward it to the Messenger Web Platform team instantly.
http://www.yourwebsitein40languages.com is the best translation system I have found. It works in real time, with no page refreshes and no popups or other distractions. Very clever and easy to install in minutes. A unique system amongst many clones.