Multilingual Application - Change Application Language

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Introduction

Developing applications supporting multiple languages has always been a drag. With the possibility of including several languages into the rc file of a project, the problem is not entirely solved: The operating system is used as a base and decides what language your application is working with.

If as example, the resources contain English and German, the application will use the English resources on an American or British Windows system, and German on a German or Swiss (German) Windows version. Other language versions of Windows will use the default language (English in most cases).

This behavior is acceptable in most cases, but can cause some headaches: A French speaking person might prefer the German version of your application, but gets by default the English version. Under Windows NT and Windows 2000, there is a simple way of adding the functionality for switching between languages.

Please note: This will only work under NT 3.51 and Windows 2000. There were some problems using NT 4.0 SP3 (and earlier?) reported, but I could not confirm them.

Step 1.

Add the desired languages to your resources.

Step 2.

Enhance your code as follows:

 // Place this code in InitInstance()
 m_lang = GetProfileInt("General","Language",0);
  if (m_lang == 0) {
    // switch language to english
    ::SetThreadLocale(MAKELCID(MAKELANGID(LANG_ENGLISH,
                       SUBLANG_DEFAULT),SORT_DEFAULT));
  }
  else {
    // switch language to german
    ::SetThreadLocale(MAKELCID(MAKELANGID(LANG_GERMAN,
                       SUBLANG_DEFAULT),SORT_DEFAULT));
  }
  //
  //
  // Add a menu or a toolbar button and attach this method 

  void CLanguageApp::OnLanguageTogglelanguage() 
  {
    if (m_lang == 0) {
      WriteProfileInt("General","Language",1);
    }
    else {
      WriteProfileInt("General","Language",0);
    }
    AfxMessageBox(IDS_RESTART); // tell the user to restart the application
  }

//