Comments please: an approach to multilanguage boilerplate

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

I am currently using Notes to let users do customized mailing - hard copy or email - to their clients. The basic text of the memo is pasted into a Notes form, interspersed with a few fields where the user can type custom values. When the user clicks on Send I insert a special item to hide all the stuff I don’t want in the email/letter, and send the document. The form has hide-when formulas on it to make it format as a business letter (meaning, display address rows) or an email as needed. It works pretty well.

But now they want to be able to send the same memo in any of several languages, Japanese for example. They are not asking for machine translation - they will supply the various language versions of the letter/email. They just want that boilerplate marked up with controls for inserting custom bits of text, just as I do now with English-only.

I could just create more versions of my form with different boilerplate on each, but I would like to avoid creating separate forms.

So I’m thinking about having the users type the boilerplate - be it English or Japanese or whatever - into a text field on a keyword document, and insert little placeholders to tell where the address goes, where the bits of custom text go and so on. The English language, North America hard-copy boilerplate would look like this:*

&name;

&company;

&address1;

&address2;

&city; &state; &postalcode;

&salutation;

&beginbody;Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah &customtext1; blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah &customtext2; blah blah blah.&endbody;

&closing;

&sender;

&cc;

Elsewhere I would have a set of keyword documents that maps each placeholder to the item name it represents in the user’s document:

placeholder

item to be inserted from the user’s document

&customtext1;

REQ_CUSTOMTEXT1

&customtext2;

REQ_CUSTOMTEXT1

To create the email or letter I would just go through the boilerplate for the selected language and replace all the placeholders with the corresponding item from the user’s document.

This approach might work but I have some questions:

  1. Have you tried something like this? What worked?

  2. When someone is filling in the Japanese boilerplate in my keyword document will they still be able to insert my little placeholders like &beginbody; and &customtext1;?

2a. If I give them a text field wherein to type the Japanese boilerplate how does Notes know that this is top-down L-R and that when inserted elsewhere it should remain so? This whole part mystifies me.

  1. I think it should be possible to use one form to preview any version of the boilerplate but I have no idea how to do this. Any comments on this?

  2. What does a user - me for example - need to have in order to view Japanese/Chinese etc characters?

  3. If I do create a form for displaying the Japanese content, what if anything do I do to the form to make it accomodate this?

Many thanks in advance!

  • This is an oversimplification. To simplify choosing between email and hard copy the address format would be described using the same method but in a separate keyword document.