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It is recommended that standards are applied in development to literals usage. Much duplication (and hence workload) can be avoided by adoption of standards; for example, uppercase for all initial letters, Nbr for number, and so on.
It is particularly recommended to check the label text on all fields in the data dictionary after they are set up. Check that this text is compliant with the standards since the label text (and not the field name) is inherited when the field is used on a screen.
Note: Changing the data dictionary field label text after the field has been included on a screen has no effect on the screen label.
Translated text may not be longer than the original text. Otherwise, there is a risk that the following field will be blanked out because its field attribute character has been overwritten.
English is the shortest of the major languages. By comparison, French and Swedish are about 30% longer, and German about 40% longer. Therefore, translated text usually requires abbreviation unless extra spaces or filler literals have been included for this purpose.
It is recommended that the CUA screen design standards are adopted, in particular with respect to field label trailers. This gives longer literals with trailing characters that allow more room for translated text.
The site may wish to use field trailers to allow more room for translation while not wanting CUA standard characters.
Customer ________________________________
Date of order ________________________________
This is most easily achieved by designing and generating the panels with ".......:" style leaders and removing them in translation using the string scan/replace facilities. This requires that the development language is also treated as a foreign language.
Another effective technique is to place a non-displayable character (such as a non-displayed blank - hex.41) at the end of the desired length of label. The MSGID is then generated at this length, but the translator and end-user just see blanks. This is particularly useful in the case of screen title text. The developer would require a keyboard with hexadecimal capacity, or the ability to copy this special character.
In the case of full‑width literals on MSGID screens (such as sub-file selection text or command key text) the CA 2E generator will generate a full-screen MSGID (for example, 78 characters long) even if the actual text is less than this. Also, column header labels are defined as the length of the header literal or the length of the underlying field, whichever is greater. This makes translation much easier (this advantage is not available with msgcons).
The following special characters are unchanged on all national language keyboards: + - , : ; _ ( ) ? = * ' " > < . Other special characters may appear differently on foreign terminals.
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