AN 18 year old French student and a handful of volunteer helpers has done what Microsoft would not do with Windows 95, making any copy of his program run in seven European languages, including Irish.
There is, of course, a massive difference in scale between Windows 95 and Arnaud Weil's shareware program WebSurf for the Psion 3a. But then there is a comparable difference in the resources available to the two programming groups - and the principle of a commitment to multiple and minority languages remains valid.
WebSurf is a viewer for files in the HTML (HyperText Mark up Language) used to create World Wide Web pages. It is an off line viewer. The Psion pocket computer cannot be used to view the Web live, since it does not as yet have a TCP "stack" - the underlying program that maintains a Web browsing program's connection to the Net. It supports a wide range of HTML tags, or markup elements, but not the newer non standard extensions like Netscape's frames. Only graphics in Psion's own .pic format can be displayed, but a .gif decoder is planned.
Even with these limitations, "you can download Internet World Wide Web files to your little Series 3a, and look at them when you are on the bus, or edit and check your Web page while on holidays" as Weil writes in the Websurf manual.
Since it can be viewed on all sorts of computers, from the Amiga to the Zenith PC, HTML is becoming increasingly popular as a standard for publishing text documents in a richer format than plain ASCII text. Perhaps due to its European roots, HTML handles accents and even non Latin fonts (Cyrillic, Japanese and Chinese, for example). The portability of HTML documents between computers was not echoed by their physical portability for as long as a conventional desktop or laptop PC was needed to read them. WebSurf changes that, for Psion owners at least.
Arnaud Weil is studying for university entrance exams, concentrating on maths and physics and bought his first Psion three years ago. "Then I started to program. A lot!... More than three years after my first Psion machine, I have to say that I was never deceived by the cute Series 3 models," he said last week.
After first using the Internet last year he wanted a World Wide Web page of his own and began learning HTML. "But writing my page on my PC wasn't easy, so I used my Psion. The missing thing was a browser to see if the page looked like I thought." There was one available "but it was really bad" and faced with the choice of either telling the author what was wrong and how to fix it or writing his own he chose the latter.
When he bought his Series 3a he had a choice between English and French versions. The English version was cheaper and included some extra software (spell checker and patience card game). "But I bought the French version simply because it was using my mother tongue." It also made the interface and commands more intuitive for him.
"That's why when I started programming WebSurf I wanted it to speak French... But making it only French speaking would have meant that only a few people would be able to use it. Before releasing it, he added English commands and menus and made the program detect whether the computer was an English or French speaking model and adjust automatically.
He says this was the hardest step, but he did it in such a way that adding further languages was child's play. After releasing it "I asked every non English speaking user who registered to translate the few sentences needed. All said yes."
Roughly speaking, he put the words for each menu item and warning message into a special subsection of the program. This section was duplicated for each new language. Once the program is told which language to use it calls in the appropriate subsection. Translating a few dozen phrases for the Irish version took no more than an hour and building them into the program was equally quick.
He is aware of the difficulty of using a program in a foreign language. "Even for those who speak English as if it was their mother tongue, it's a real delight to run a program speaking their language. That's why I'm very proud of WebSurf as it's the only Series 3a program which can speak 50 many languages... and one of the few home made (not really commercial) programs which can speak more than one language.