1. Development Guidelines for Application Design Guide
  2. Translation Guidelines

Translation Guidelines

Language translation of reports can be a particularly time-consuming and expensive endeavor. To facilitate report translation, follow these guidelines for spacing and anchoring all boilerplate text. Oracle recommends that you allow 30% for text expansion.

  • Do not format the document by using characters. For example the following string is not acceptable:

    This image is described in the surrounding text.

    Instead, it is recommended that you use a 2-celled table and bold the text, as shown in this example:

    This image is described in the surrounding text.

  • Do not use consecutive symbols in a translatable string, for example, By: ________. If you need to create this type of text along with consecutive underscores to indicate a line, use a 2-celled, borderless table with the text in the left column (such as the word "By" in the previous example). Then use the lower border of the second cell to achieve the line.

  • Do not use words connected with underscores, for example, ACCOUNTING_SEQUENCE_NAME. This type of string will not be translated.

  • Do not concatenate a variable string with a static string at runtime to create a string. There are several translatability issues with this approach. The translator will not be able to determine the variable string value.

  • Do not use incorrect spelling in templates. Use a spell checker to ensure that the words are spelled correctly.