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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] MultiLanguage Support for Wireshark ????

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:10:01 -0700

On Aug 27, 2009, at 3:27 AM, khushbu.thakkar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Do we have multiple language support with Wireshark.
We are using Windows Xp SP2 and Ubuntu Linux environment.

Actually we have a plugin which is UDP based and we have a requirement to Analyse the Information in Packet List Pane and Packet Details Pane to be viewed in other languages like French, German, Italian etc ... So is it possible with Wireshark version - 1.2.0.

No, it isn't.

Multi-lingual support for the menus etc. is probably implementable.

However, there are a *LOT* of dissectors, *ALL* of which would have to have the text they put into the packet list pane and packet details pane in order to support multiple languages in those panes - and people keep contributing new dissectors and updates to existing dissectors, and all text they add would also have to be translated in order to keep the non-English versions of them up to date.

To quote the page to which Jaap referred:

	http://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Translations

"Which parts have to be translated to become useful? The most important part is the dissector related output.

Don't underestimate the amount of text in the dissectors! There are currently 600 dissectors (rising), each containing a lot of text. Translating all of this might be just impossible in a reasonable amount of time!

On the other hand, doing an incomplete translation is really ugly and has to be avoided. The User's guide and the Wireshark GUI could be translated, but would this be useful? This will be a lot of work and most of the really interesting output will still be untranslated."

(Note the native language of the person I'm quoting is German; he also said, on that page, "I'm german and thought about a german translation, but dismissed the idea because of the reasons above.")