From: "Alexander V. Serdukov"
To: "Tim Mann"
Subject: Russian versions of XBoard and WinBoard 
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 17:30:57 +0400

Dear Dr Mann:

Recently I have translated into Russian your famous programs WinBoard and
XBoard.
I imagined that you could be pleased to hear the news.
The source codes and the winboard.exe are available from

http://www.sbor.net/~avs/winboard/winboard_ru.html

and

http://www.sbor.net/~avs/xboard/xboard_ru.html

Though, these web pages are in Russian, so here are the direct references to
the project files in case you will need them:

http://www.sbor.net/~avs/xboard/xboard-4.2.6.1-ru.tar.gz
http://www.sbor.net/~avs/winboard/winboard-4.2.6.1-ru-src.tar.gz
http://www.sbor.net/~avs/winboard/winboard-4.2.6.1-ru-cygwin.gz
(winboard.exe)

I do not plan to support the Russian version in the future, so I have tried
to make the translation as complete as possible. Though not everything is
translated. For example, the help file for WinBoard is not touched at all,
and for XBoard I made only
brief translation of the man page.

I am not sure about the reasons I did that translation. I am not a
programmer, not a professional translator, and, of cause, not a chess
master. But I like the XBoard/WinBoard. Does one need any other special
reason to do something like that? My first intention was to change menu with
a tool like "Resource Hacker", but alas, in WinBoard-4.2.6 it is impossible
to get to the main menu bar from win32 resources. So, I downloaded the
source. But I was not sure that I would be able to compile WinBoard, and
finally I began from XBoard. And if the XBoard is already translated, why
not to do the same with WinBoard?

When translating WinBoard, I have added some strings, to the win32
resources. These are the text strings from main menu bar, chess clock text,
"Minimize" menu item, and the Pause button text ("||","|>" instead of "P"
and "C"). You might do something like that for the next versions of
WinBoard.
I dare to enclose the .tar.gz archive with the files, which demonstrate how
it is done in Russian version. All added resources are in STRINGTABLE
section of winboard.rc. They are loaded with MyLoadString function (don't
laugh at it though, I found out it works and was too lazy to study WinAPI
further), see winboard.c. The winboard.c is not changed in other ways. You
may do with these files whatever you want.

I believe that including these strings into the win32 recourses could be the
first move to the true internationalization of WinBoard.

Sincerely,
Alexander V. Serdukov.