[bt-devel] Language Setting

[John B. Turpish]

I do see how dynamic translation is important to the user experience 
involved in changing the setting, but I do think being able to determine 
what language BibleTime starts up in is a feature in its own right. 
Although it might look less professional, I think it would be more 
functional if, until the day we have all widgets in bt dynamically 
translating, you could change that setting and at that point it would 
pop up a dialog (in the new language? existing one? both?) informing you 
that "Language selection will not take effect until the next time you 
start BibleTime".

Taking it a step further, the same dialog could add, "Would you like to 
restart BibleTime now?" or similar and if they click "Restart" either 
destroy all the UI elements and re-create them (Google tells me some 
other projects handle it this way) or literally restart the process (on 
Unix-like systems this could be a simple execv, which is what my local 
build is doing).

Another way to delay biting the bullet would be to use a proxy 
translator - a subclass of QTranslator that forwards to its base class 
for all the real work, and then keeps track of a reverse mapping. Then 
when the language changes you iterate through all the windows and 
widgets accessing their current text, undoing the original translation, 
translating into the new target, and then setting the new text. This is 
obviously not perfect, because languages are not 1:1 and though you 
could make some solid guesses about the current context you would have 
no way to access the disambiguation text. The translator *could* change 
the returned values to avoid translation conflicts within a given 
context by appending '\0' characters (since they don't show up on the 
screen - or is that just my font?), but there's absolutely no way to fix 
a situation that does something like tr("dynamic")+var+tr("text").