> replicate the entire specification.  I was wondering if there
> couldn't be a way to specify the multi-lingual text in the same
> definition.   Something like:
> 
>    .....
>    option {en: "english text", fr: "french text", ...}, ....;

From my (daytime work) experience in creating multilingual software: don't
do that.

Give it a massage-id and and create an easy-to-edit file for every language
listing those id's and their value. Make it one file for the whole project.
A translator then (for a new language) chooses the language he knows best,
copies it over and translates it. He then saves the original template for his
translation or marks the translated version with the cvs id of the original,
so he can look at cvsdiff's for the original version when needing to update
his translation.

The only viable alternative that proved working for me is: use a database,
indexed by message-id and having one column per supported language. This
requires good front-end tools to do the translation, which we don't have
available. And this doesn't fit into the build structure very well. If you
think of your representation as a text-based database, this would be ok.
But you *realy* need appropriate editing tools for this setup. Changing every
entry in the eleventh column in a text file where lines have about 2000 
characters each is no fun. Cvs diffing this is no fun either.


Martin