Thanks for the thoughts.

And for the correction on that link I posted--it's been a while since I looked
at it and forgot what was there.

Harlan Grove wrote:

Dave Peterson wrote...
I don't know of any excel translators for this kind of thing--I
have seen function translators, but they don't seem to translate
the strings passed to these special type functions.
...

And they shouldn't. But when we get to shoulds and shouldn'ts, Microsoft
shouldn't have copied 123's @CELL function so closely. There's a syntactic
device that Microsoft could have used but didn't: using # followed by words
or phrases as tokens that could have been automatically translated just like
error values (I'm assuming here that, e.g., #VALUE! differs from language
version to language version). So in English the formula

=CELL(#CONTENTS,X99)

would become, maybe,

=ZELLE(#INHALT;X99)

in German. The advantage of XLM functions is that they use numbers for this,
and numbers don't need translating. They're equally cryptic in all language
versions.

Anyway, if internationalization is important, one must avoid using CELL and
INFO *or* use a table lookup in which the top row would contain the language
ID (I'd prefer the 2-letter abbreviations, e.g., en, de, fr, es), the 2nd
row a particular valid 1st args to either CELL or INFO in the given language
CHOSEN TO DIFFER BETWEEN ALL LANGUAGES (not necessary to use the same arg
for all languages, would be OK to use Ligne for French, Parenthese for
English, Inhalt for German, etc.), the 3rd row formulas like =CELL(R[-1]C)
to evaluate the args in the 2nd row. Then lookup the nonerror value in the
3rd row of the table to determine current language (column index in the
table). Subsequent rows would then contain all the valid CELL and INFO first
arguments where all columns in each row contain translations for the same
thing. Put a column of formulas in the column TO THE LEFT of this table that
would evaluate to the current language.

This isn't the same thing that Green et al suggest in the linked chapter in
your other response. That chapter covers VBA internationalization.

--

Dave Peterson