I tried to get something on 'Internationalizing', but all I could find was the chapter in the VB manual, and an announcement of a forthcoming Microsoft Press book.

Anyway, for what it is worth, this is what we did..

Official Microsoft documentation talks of using the resource file to allow other language support, but we decided to use a separate external text file for each language. This allows maintenance of the language to be done in the 'foreign' country, without having to recompile.

I was really surprised about how easy it was.

In each forms Load event is...

    Private Form_Load
    Call LoadCaptions(Me)

    Public Sub LoadCaptions(vForm as Form)
    Dim Lv_Control as Control

        vForm.Caption = LanguageText(vForm.Tag)
        For Each lv_Control In vForm.Controls
            With lv_Control
                .Caption = LanguageText(.Tag)
                #If Win32 Then
                    .ToolTipText = ToolTipTextText(.Tag)
                #End If

                'Tab controls need a fiddle because
                'only the Control has a tag
                'li_t is offset
               .TabCaption(li_t) = LanguageText(.Tag + li_t) 
            End With
        Next lv_Control
    End Sub

The Text and Sequence numbers from the language file are loaded into a dynamic array.

The language file in english (ready to be translated), but also needed for the 'English' version, was produced automatically with a small programme that loops through each form using the VBP file.

The programme has 2 functions...

1. Writes an incrementing sequence number (jumping in blocks of 1000 for each Form) into each controls' .Tag (got to be careful here - it actually copied from *.FRM to *.FR1 files...)
2. Writes the .Caption (in english) and the Sequence number to a text file

I found out that menus can have a Tag!

When you change language, labels, buttons, tabs etc refresh immediately, but the menus usually need an exit/restart.

The convention for Chinese menus appears to be XXXXXX (&O) - ie the hot key is added after the chinese script, in european characters.

All MsgBox() messages had to be searched for manually and put in the language file.

We had to do some compromises to allow for different grammatical structure - sometimes the wording has to be a bit clumsy in english - but many times we ended up expressing things more clearly in english.

We had to do a 'fix' for Chinese.

(I have no idea why Chinese works in VB4 - I thought VB4 was 1 byte = 1 character)

We use the API calls...

    li_HeightUsed = DrawText(hdc, ls_Text, Len(ls_Text), lr_rect, i_Align)
    li_ret = TextOut(hdc, x, y, ls_Text, Len(ls_Text))

DrawText and TextOut seemed to be confused about the actual length of the string. But we found that if the Len() was * 2 it was ok.

So we have a function...

    Public Function MyLen(as_Text as string)
    'returns length of string, but doubled if chinese
    If Asc(as_text)<0 Then
        MyLen = 2 * Len(as_Text)
    Else
        MyLen = Len(as_Text)
    End if

    li_ret = TextOut(hdc, x, y, ls_Text, MyLen(ls_Text))

Whether we get the same problem in VB6, or it's all fixed with LenB() etc, I am yet to find out.

(The reason for VB4 is that there is a glut of extremely cheap, highly reliable P90 Toshiba notebooks running W3.1, ideal for field use with this particular application.)