Question

Does Microsoft implementation of C# runtime offer some localization mechanism to translate common strings like Overflow, Stack overflow, Underflow, etc…

See the code below – it’s a part of Mono and Mono itself has a Locale.GetText routine for making such translations.

// Added to avoid possible integer overflow.
if (inputOffset > inputBuffer.Length - inputCount)
    throw new ArgumentException("inputOffset" +
                                Locale.GetText("Overflow");

Now – how is it done in Microsoft version of runtime and how can I use it, for example, to get the localized equivalent of Overflow without adding resource files?

Answer 1

.NET provides a framework that makes it easy to localize your content (ResourceManager) and while it internally maintains some translations for its own purpose (for example DateTime.ToString gives you a textual representation for the date/time that is locally appropriate, which includes the translated month and day names), it does not provide you with any ready-made translations, be they common strings or not. It could hardly do this reliably anyway, as there is a plethora of human languages out there and words can have different translations depending on context etc.

In your example, I would say that you are OK with untranslated exception messages. Although Microsoft recommends that you localize exception descriptions and they do localize their own (at least for major languages), this advice seems ill-thought at it’s not only a waste of effort to translate all this text that users probably should never see, but it can make debugging a nightmare.