Mark Text for Translation

During project development, you need to mark any text you want to change to another language at runtime with a language change indicator, like this:

@( Native Text [,Width [,Justify]])

where Native Text is the text to be translated. This text will be replaced by the local equivalent at runtime.

Be aware that the brackets are necessary as they specify the extent of the native language text; Width and Justify are optional (indicated by the square brackets).

For example, if English is the native language, you could enter the following alarm description:

This indicator serves two purposes; it flags the text as native, and tells Citect SCADA to change the text from native to local at runtime.

By default, the text that you enter here can be in any combination of upper- and lowercase. In other words, Motor Inoperative will be considered the same string as motor inoperative or MOTOR Inoperative, and they will have the same local languageThe language of the end user. Runtime display items such as alarm descriptions, button text, keyboard/alarm logs, graphic text, Cicode strings and so on can be displayed in the local language, even though they may have been configured in the language of the developer (native language). translation. Case-sensitivity can be introduced by setting the [Language]CaseSensitive parameter to 1.

Note:
1. The [Language]CaseSensitive parameter does not apply to alarm strings. Alarm strings are always case sensitive. For example Motor Inoperative is different to MOTOR INOPERATIVE.
2. Alarm fields no longer support Width and Justify options.
Refer to the topic Mark Alarm Text for Translation for more information

Width can be assigned any value from 0 to 254. If the local text is longer than specified, it is truncated and left-justified. If a width is not specified, the field is the length of the local text and the text left-justified.

Justify specifies the text justification and can only be used with Width.

Justify can be one of the following values:

• l or L - Left
• r or R - Right
• c or C - Center
• n or N - None

For example, to limit the local text in the previous case to 20 characters with right justification:

Characters that are normally part of the formatting - @ , () - can also be used within the native text. To do this, place a caret (^) character before them. For example, to include a comma without introducing a formatting error:

See Also

Published June 2018