How to use a Russian program when you can't read Russian

[romulus]

There are some programs which are in the Russian language which are useful for data recovery. But I don't understand Russian.

Step 1. Learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet
Try this: Look at the Google Czech language news.
http://news.google.ca/news?ned=cs_cz
I assume you don't know that language or any other Slavic language. You will probably be able to read several words because they are the same as in English. Probably you can guess what several news articles are about. If you go to the Russian news, and you don't know Cyrillic, then its just like Arabic or Chinese, you can't read a thing.

If you learn the Cyrillic letters, using a Russian program becomes like using a program in Polish or Czech. Many words are the same in both English and Russian, just like those other languages.

There are only 33 letters so it isn't hard to learn. Some of them are the same, some are like Greek, and some are false friends. I think it can be learned easily.

Step 2. Learn to enter Cyrillic letters into a computer.
You can type the letters here using an on-screen keyboard.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage ... reen_e.htm

Then, if you see some word in a Russian program you don't understand, you can type this word. Then you can copy the Russian text into Babelfish and translate it.
http://babelfish.altavista.com

Step 3. Extract the Russian text strings from the program. If you have the Russian text strings that occur in the program it is easier to translate things. You can do this by copying the .exe file to the extension .txt, then load this .txt file with a web browser. Now you can change the character encoding with the web browser to Cyrillic and read the text. Then you can select all this text into the clipboard and copy it into notepad. Now if the Russian program displays some text string, you can type a small number of the Russian letters which occur in the text string with the web keyboard, say 3-4. Then copy these letters to the clipboard. Search the Russian program text for the same letters by pasting them into the search box. Find the string which contains the 3-4 letters and matches the rest of what you see in the program. Copy it into the clipboard, and then into Babelfish. It's faster than typing the whole thing when you don't know Cyrillic well.

I found that using these techniques allows me to use a Russian program.

[vrocco]

Seems like a lot of work. What is this Russian program that is so great that nothing like it has been written in English?

[bnice]

If possible to use a translator tool, that can. Read any language and translate into a chosen language, in the software used. This would be useful if worked in win and dos. Is there a tool to do this. In use without translation you see on screen the word $*&%"^!. With translation it could be any correctly translated word, like Continue.

The translator would have to parse the software code strings to do each translation. Not an easy task, with so many compressions, protected files and many code types in softwares.

Most of these russian coders do speak english. Why do they not make english versions of their softwares !!

[Doomer]

Most of these russian coders do speak english. Why do they not make english versions of their softwares !!

Sometimes there is special purpose - do not allow non-Russian speaking persons use such programs, I think hddl.exe (and if I'm not mistaken cp.exe too) were made with that purpose
But most of the programs have English interface even if they were developed by Russians