Wrong Language in Dialog Boxes

BSA650 · 27th February 2003

Recently some older, probably 16 bit apps, on my Win2k computer have started displaying dialog boxes in German. All of the newer programs display just fine.

I'm assuming that a program I installed replaced an older Win98 or Win95 language file somewhere on the machine, substituting a German version for an English version. I just don't know which file it could be.

Would anyone know what file to look for or have any other ideas? Thanks ....!

Geezer · 27th February 2003

First thing coming to mind is copy the dialog box message and go to your public library (or on the internet) .. get an English/German dictionary.. you should then have an idea which program is involved.

Swelldom · 27th February 2003

Online dictionaries are much faster. Also, foreign programs tend to have the same name in any language.

BSA650 · 27th February 2003

The dialog boxes are the normal ones that I expect to see in a program such as, "Do you wish to save changes?" It's just in German. Also, items like the title bar of the program are in German.

The reason I'm concentrating on a file is that I have a vague memory of a language control file in older versions of Windows, and the only programs that are affected are Win95, possibly Win 3.1 era programs. New programs work just fine, so it's not a Control Panel - Language setting issue and I don't think it's a registry issue, though I could be wrong.

Swelldom · 27th February 2003

It depends on the program. Most programs use their own language settings though rather than sharing any particular language file. The main reason is that a language file doesn't necessarily provide everything needed to display the exact message desired. The settings are probably in the program itself.

schamish · 28th February 2003

You can easily translate the German messages to English at

http://www.worldlingo.com/products_s...ranslator.html

you may have to hunt at www.worldlingo.com for "machine translate" this is to the right of the payservice of "human translation"

the website will translate for free either text or even urls
the kids use it now to translate difficult school French translation assignments and then copy the results into longhand for submission.