Multilingual Interface (MUI) Implementation & Language Selector

[nbb1967]

Description

This PR provides full Internationalization (i18n) support for the project. It supersedes and includes all changes from #214, #218, and #220.

Key features of this stage:

• Added Form to select the application language.
• The user's selection is saved in the Windows Registry.
• Application automatically loads the interface in the language selected by the user at startup.

Build Status:

The project compiles without errors in both Debug and Release modes.

For the app author:

• A concise "how-to" comment has been added to the cppcryptfs.rc header. It provides a simple, zero-code procedure for integrating new languages in the future.

For Translators:

• Translation Kit: Entire /en/ folder.
• Guide: The header of Resources_EN.rc file contains directives for translators.

[bailey27]

Thanks for the localization work. This is great.

One thing I'd prefer to keep unchanged is the copyright notices and license texts. Open-source licenses are generally considered legally authoritative in their original (e.g. English) form, and translations can introduce ambiguity or unintended legal differences. Because of that, most projects keep the license and copyright strings in English even when the UI itself is localized.

For this project I'd rather leave the copyright and license text as-is and only translate the UI strings. That also avoids the extra maintenance burden of keeping translated license texts in sync if they change.

Everything else in the localization work looks good. Thanks again for contributing this.

[nbb1967]

An open-source license is, first and foremost, a gesture of respect toward the people whose work (code) you have used. And it’s best to leave the legal bullshit to the lawyers and proprietary software. The MIT License in English in the About section—formally, from a legal standpoint, it’s absolutely perfect, but in essence, it’s like a prayer in dead Latin...
However, it’s your program, so I won’t argue.

Will you roll back the file yourself or should I?
Need to move RCDATA and VERSION to the non-localized cppcryptfs.rc. Move the lic folder to the res folder. Restore the array of 8 Copyright in the code and remove them from STRINGS. Correct the comment for translators in the Resources_EN header (remove the mention of RCDATA).

Migrating licenses to RCDATA greatly simplifies maintenance: when you switch from the dual OpenSSL license to their new Apache 2.0 license, it will only take a couple of minutes to make the change.

[bailey27]

I'll make the changes myself. I think I'll keep the external project copyright notices as a strings in the non-localized rc also.

[nbb1967]

OK. Please note the cppcryptfs copyright: the second line from the top on the About tab: it is linked to VERSION, although a similar line is included in STRINGS:

Resources_EN.rc (377):

IDS_COPYRIGHT "Copyright (C) 2016-2025 Bailey Brown. All Rights Reserved."

[nbb1967]

//The terms "Copyright" and "All rights reserved" are included in Microsoft's terminology database recommended for localizing Windows programs. They are usually translated...
Microsoft Terminology Search