By EVO:RAIL

One of my favorite gags at UK VMUGs when I’m asked to present on EVO:RAIL is to start a demo off in a different language.

bonjour

It’s largely to put the wind up my fellow Brits, as we are somewhat notorious for not being able to speak other European languages. Generally, the British response to being confronted by someone who cannot (or in the case of the French WILL not!) speak English – is TO SPEAK MORE SLOWLY AND LOUDLY AND USE WILD SWEEPING GESTURES!!! My joke is usually to say that EVO:RAIL is soooo easy to configure you could do it in a language which you don’t understand. Look I said it was a joke, I didn’t promise that it would be funny, alright?

Anyway…. The main thing to say is apparently a bit of cash was burned in order provide multi-language support to both the EVO:RAIL Configuration UI and the Management UI. By default we use the browser’s default language settings to display the page. Sadly, most people don’t bother with those web-browser language settings – so all they see is the U.S. English version. [Notice I how I say U.S English, as distinct from British English, Australian English and Canadian English.].

A number of translations were made including:

  • French = FR
  • German = DE
  • Japanese = JA
  • Korean = KO
  • Simplified Chinese = zh-Hans
  • Traditional Chinese = zh-Hant

It is possible to dial-up these translations by piping the ISO language codes to the web-browser with the /?lang=CODE syntax – for example French would be:

https://192.168.10.200:7443/?lang=FR

Web-browsers have their own places for setting language preference. This varies between Windows, Linux and the Mac – and from browser to browser. Don’t cha just love the consistency that web-based platforms deliver? 😉

FireFox on the Mac:

Screen Shot 2015-01-04 at 09.59.04

Google Chrome on the Mac:

Screen Shot 2015-01-04 at 10.00.19

Conclusions:

Impress your colleagues, friends and family with your impeccable multi-lingual skills! What I cannot vouch for is if these translations are any good. To be honest most U.S based software companies do not have a glorious reputation for other languages when it comes to product documentation and the product itself. The less said about special characters in passwords the better. Let’s just gloss over that one shall we?

I was once in Athens, Greece (just in case you thought I was referring to one in Tennessee!) teaching a Virtual Infrastructure “Install and Configure” (ESX3.x/vCenter 2.x) course when I spied a Greek version of Windows XP. I asked my student what he thought of the translation and he said it was “Total ΒΘζζΔΧς”