Are linux/input.h keycodes layout independent? - linux

For example, in input.h, KEY_D is equal to 32. On a QWERTY keyboard, D is the third "printable" key from left on home row. On a DVORAK keyboard, the same key is marked E. So, if I press E on a DVORAK keyboard, will I get KEY_D (32) or KEY_E (18)?

You will get KEY_D. These values are abstraction of keys as they are placed on a typical physical keyboard (see ISO 9995), after abstracting from all interface details (see e.g. three PC scancode sets and other mesh). But this does not take alternative layouts into account yet, neither national layouts like AZERTY nor special ones like Dvorak. They are implemented on the next layer, where independent keycodes are affected by modifiers and translated to resulting strings and events.
The USB "HID usage tables" document explicitly says:
Note
A general note on Usages and languages: Due to the variation of keyboards from language to language, it is not feasible to specify exact key mappings for every language. Where this list is not specific for a key function in a language, the closest equivalent key position should be used, so that a keyboard may be modified for a different language by simply printing different keycaps. One example is the Y key on a North American keyboard. In Germany this is typically Z. Rather than changing the keyboard firmware to put the Z Usage into that place in the descriptor list, the vendor should use the Y
Usage on both the North American and German keyboards. This continues to be the existing practice in the industry, in order to minimize the number of changes to the electronics to accommodate other languages.
so, if even your keyboard is initially Dvorak, you will get KEY_D. You can treat it as "generic" KEY_C03 (see again ISO9995 key names), if this satisfies (most XKB layout sources use this notation).

Related

Remap one of the two Tilde/swiggly keys to become Right-Shift key

I have purchased a used laptop, Shinelon TN15S (China-based company). The keyboard layout in one glance looks normal, however once I've started using it, there is one major annoyance.
This keyboard has two tilde/swiggly keys. The upper-left key is fine as that is what I always use, but the one on the lower-right is not. What makes me annoyed is that it makes the Right-Shift key becomes shorter like a single key. So I frequently "accidentally" pressed the lower-right tilde/swiggly key when I intend to use the Right-Shift key.
So far, I've tried to use a few keyboard remapper software like SharpKeys and Powertoys for Win10. However, these 2 keys are not independent - if I remap the lower-right tilde/swiggly key to become right-shift key, the upper-left also becomes the shift key as well.
I also look at AutoHotkey, but I'm not sure if it can be used for this, and I'm not very good at writing scripts as well. If anyone has similar keyboard layout like this and can point me to the solution, I would be very much appreciated.

Password restrictions to support international travellers

Yes, using any restrictions on the letters that a user can put in his password weakens security. But on the other hand: have you ever tried the Euro sign (€) on a Thai keyboard? Or a German Umlaut (Ä) on an English keyboard?
For this reason I have been using the following regex restriction for my travelling customers for years now:
^[0-9a-zA-Z #.\-_+]+$ (so basically numbers, letters, blank and # . - _ + are allowed).
Although there have never been complaints (and more importantly people were able to login no matter which keyboard layout) I want to extend this collection of letters.
Which letters are safe to use - no matter what kind of national keyboard a user has?
I would go ahead and say all letters are safe. If they can type it on their home computer I don't see why restricting them to a national patterned keyboard would be a problem.
However, I would be more concerned with what can be typed on a cellphone keyboard. Holding down the keys generally gives you a lot of options to include international symbols.
Mobile devices are much more common than personal computers and this gap is only growing.

Fuzzy substring search from a list of strings

Okay, I've seen lots of posts about fuzzy string matching, Levenstein distance, longest common substring, and so on. None of them seem to fit exactly for what I want to do. I'm pulling product results from a variety of web services, and from those I can build a big list of names for the product. These names may include a bunch of variable junk. Here are some examples, from SearchUPC:
Apple 60W magsafe adapter L-shape with extension cord
Original Apple 60W Power Adapter (L-shaped Connector) for MacBook MC461LL/A with AC Extension Wall Cord (Bulk Packaging)
Current Apple MagSafe 60W Power Adapter for MacBook MC461LL/A with AC Extension Wall Cord (Bulk Packaging)
Apple 60W MagSafe Power Adapter - Apple Mac Accessories
Apple - MagSafe 60W Power Adapter for MacBook and 13\" MacBook Pro
MagSafe - power adapter - 60 Watt
etc. What I'd like to do is pull the common product name (which to my heuristic human eye is obviously Apple 60W MagSafe Power Adapter), but none of the aforementioned methods seem likely to work. My main problem is that I don't know what to search the list of strings for... At first, I was thinking of trying longest common substring, but it seems like that will fail as a bunch of the strings have things out of order, which might yield a product name of power adapter, which is not terribly useful to the user.
Note: the vast majority of the records returned from the SearchUPC API (mostly omitted here) do include the literal string "Apply 60W MagSafe Power Adapter".
I'm implementing this in Objective-C, for iOS, but I'm really interested in the algorithm more than the implementation, so any language is acceptable.
If you want to compare strings but need something more robust than longest common substring with respect to changed order of substrings, you might look into a technique called string tiling. Simplified, the principle is as follows:
Find the largest common substring (larger than a minimum length) in both strings
Remove that substring from both strings
Repeat until there are no more substrings larger than your minimal length
In practice, the ratio between the remaining (unmatched) stringparts to the initial lengths is a excellent indicator on how well the strings match. And the technique is extremely robust against reordering of substrings. You can find the scientific paper by M. Wise describing this technique here. I have implemented the algorithm myself in the past (it's not hard), but apparantly free implementations are readily available (for example here). While I have used the algorithm in a variety of fuzzy matching scenarios, I can't vouch for the implementation which I have never used myself.
String tiling does not solve the problem of finding the largest common productname in itself, but it seems to me that by slightly modifying the algorithm, you can do so. You're probably less interested in calculating the matchpercentage than in the keeping the similar parts?
As the previous poster remarked, such fuzzy matching almost always needs some kind of manual validation, as both false positives and false negatives are unavoidable.
Sounds like your approach needs to be two fold. One should be matching records with one another. The other part is pulling the "canonical name" out of those matching records. In your case it is a product, but same concept. I'm not sure how you will go about associating groups of matching records with the standardized product name, but I would suggest trying to pull the important information out of the records and trying to match that to some resources on the Internet. For instance, for your example, maybe you compare your data to an apple product list. Or you could try and have a robot that crawls google and pulls the top result to try and associate. Bottom line, at the end of the day, if your text is really dirty, you will need to include some human intervention. What I mean is that you may set a threshold for match, no match, and needs review. Good luck.

Detecting presence (arrival/departure) with active RFID tags

Actually arrival is pretty simple, tag gets into a range of receivers antenna, but the departure is what is causing the problems.
First some information about the setup we have.
Tags:
They work at 433Mhz, every 1.5 seconds they transmit a "heartbeat", on movement they go into a transmission burst mode which lasts for as long as they are moving.
They transmit their ID, transmission sequence number(1 to 255, repeating over and over), for how long they have been in use, and input from motion sensor, if any. We have no control over them whatsoever. They will continue doing what they do until their battery dies. And they are sealed shut.
Receiver forwards all that data + signal strength of a tag to our software. Software can work with several receivers. Currently we are using omnidirectional antennas.
How can we be sure that the tag has departed from premises?
Problems:
Sometimes two or more tags transmit "heartbeat" at the same time and no signal is received. With number of tags increasing these collisions happen more often, this problem is solved by tags randomly changing their heartbeat rate (in several milliseconds) to avoid collisions. Problem is I can't rely on tags not "checking in" for a certain period of time as sign of departure. It could be timeout because of collisions. Because of these collisions we cannot rely that every "heartbeat" will be received.
Tag manufacturer advised that we use two receivers and set them up as a gate for tags to pass through. Based on the order of tags passing through "gates" we can tell in which direction they are going. The problem with our omnidirectional antennas is that sometimes tag signal bounces of building and then arrives to receiver. So based on signal strength it looks like its farther away then it is.
Does anybody have a solution of what we can do to have a reliable way of determining if tags are coming or leaving? Also we can setup antennas in different way as well.
I wrote the software that interprets data from receivers, so that part can be manipulated in any way. But I'm out of ideas of how to interpret information to get reliability we need.
Right now the only idea is to try out with directional antennas? But I would like to tryout all the options with the current equipment we have.
Also any literature suggestion that deals with active RFID tags is more than welcome, most of books I've found deal with passive tag solutions.
As a top level statement, if you need to track items leaving your site, your RFID technology is probably the wrong one. The technology you have is better suited to the positional tracking tags within a large area - eg a factory floor. Notwithstanding the above, here is my take:
A good approach to active RFID is to break your area down into zones that are tied to your business processes, for example:
Warehouse
Loading bay
Packing
Entry of a tag into a zone represents the start of a new process or perhaps the end of a process the tag is currently in. For example, moving from warehouse to the packing represents assembling a shipment, and movement into the loading bay initiates a shipment.
The crux of many RFID implementations is the installation and configuration of the RFID intrastructure to:
Map tag -> asset (which you have done)
Map tag read -> zone (and by inference asset -> zone)
Map movements between zones to steps in a business processes (and therefore understand when an asset leaves the site, your goal)
There are a number of considerations: the physical characteristics of 433MHz signals, position of antennae, sensitivity of antennae and some tricks that some vendors have. After an optimal site configuration, then you may need to have some processing tricks on the tag reads that will pour in.
Dirty data
Always keep in mind that tag read data is dirty - that RF interference (from unshielded motors, electric wiring, etc), weather conditions and physical manipulation of tags (eg covering with metal) happen all the time.
RSSI's are like stock tickers - there is a lot of random/microeconomic noise on top of broad macroeconomic trends. To interpret movement, compute the linear regression of groups of reads rather then rely on a specific read's RSSI.
If you do see a tag broadcasting with a high RSSI, which then falls to medium then low and then disappears, you really can interpret that as the tag is leaving the range of the receiver. Is that off-site? Well, you need to consider the site's layout (the zones) and the positioning of receivers within the zones.
TriangulationTrilateration
EDIT I had incorrectly used the term 'triangulation'. This refers to determining the position of something by known the angle it subtends from two or three known locations. In RFID, you use the distance and as such it is called 'trilateration'.
In my experience, vendors selling the tag technology you describe have server software that determines the absolute position of the tags using the received RSSI. You should be able to obtain the position of the tag within 1-10m using such software. Determining if the tag is moving off-site is then easy.
To code this yourself:
First, each tag is pinging away when moving. These pings hit the receivers at almost the same time and sent to the server. However the messages can sometimes arrive out of order or interleaved with earlier and later reads from other receivers. To help correlate pings, the ping contains a sequence number. You are looking for tag reads from the same tag, with the same sequence number, received by three (or more) receivers. If more than three, pick the three with the largest RSSI.
The distance is approximated from RSSI. This is not linear and subject to non-trivial random variation. A quick google turns up:
Given three approximate distances from three known points (the receivers' locations), you can then resolve the approximate position of the tag using Trilateration using 3 latitude and longitude points, and 3 distances.
Now you have the absolute position of the tag. You can use these positions to track the absolute movement of the tag.
To make this useful, you should position receivers so that you can reliably detect tags right up to the physical site boundaries. You should then determine a 'geofence' around your site, within receiver range. I would write a business rule that states:
If the last known position of a tag was outside the geofence, and
A tag read from the tag has not been detected in (say) 10s, then
Declare the tag has left the site.
By using the trilateration and geofence, you can focus the business logic on only those tags close to going awol. If you fail to receive your 1.5s ping only a few times from such a tag, it's highly likely that the tag has gone outside your receiver's range, and therefore off-site.
You're already aware that tag reads can sometimes come from reflections. If you have a lot of these, then your trilateration will be pretty poor. So this method works best when there are fairly large open spaces and minimal reflectors.
Some RFID vendors have all this built into their servers - processing this by writing your own code is (clearly) non-trivial.
Zone design using wide-area receivers
Logical design of zones can help the business logic layer. For example, suppose you have two zones (A and B) with two receivers (1 and 2):
A B
+----------+----------+
| | |
| 1 | 2 |
| | |
+----------+----------+
If you get tag reads from the tag at receiver 1, then one at receiver 2, how do you interpret that? Did tag T move into zone B, or just get a read at the extreme range of 2?
If you get a later read at 1, did the tag move back, or did it never move?
A better physical solution is:
A B
+----------+----------+
| | |
| 1 2 3 |
| | |
+----------+----------+
In this approach, a tag moving from A to B would get reads from the following receivers:
1 1 1 2 1 2 2 3 2 2 3 2 3 3 3 3 3
-------> time
From a programming logic point of view, a movement from A -> B has to traverse reads 1 -> 2 -> 3 (even though there is a lot of jitter). It gets even easier to interpret when you combine with RSSI.
Portal design with directional receivers
You can create quite a good portal using two directional receivers (you will need to spend some time configuring the antenna and sensitivity carefully). Mount a receiver well above the door on both sides. Below is a schematic from the side. R1 and R2 are the receivers (and the rough read field is shown), and on the left is a worker pushing an asset through the door:
----> direction of motion
-------------------+----------------
R1 | R2
/ \ | / \
o / \ / \
|-++ / \ / \
|\++ / \ / \
------------------------------------------
You should get a pattern of reads like this:
<nothing> 1 1 1 1 1 12 1 21 2 12 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 <nothing>
-------> time
This indicates a movement from receiver 1 to receiver 2.
"Signposts"
Savi implementations often use "sign posts" to assist with location. The sign post emits beam that illuminates a small area (like a doorway) in a 123KHz beam. The signpost also transmits a unique number identifying itself (left door might be 1, while the right door might be 2). When the tag passes through the beam, it wakes up and re-broadcasts the number. The reader now knows which door the tag passed through.
Watch out for any metal in the surrounding area. 123KHz travels extremely well down rebar in concrete walls, metal fences and rail tracks. We once had tags reporting themselves hundreds of meters from a signpost due to such effects.
With this approach you can implement a portal much like you would for passive.
Simulating signposts
If you don't have the ability to use signposts, then there is a dirty hack:
Stick a passive RFID tag to your active RFID tag
Install a passive RFID reader on each doorway
Passive RFID is actually very good in restricted spaces, so this implementation can work very well. This solution may be the same cost (or cheaper) than with your active RFID vendor.
If you're clever, you can use the EPC GIAI namespace for the passive tag ID and so burn it with the active tag ID. Both active and passive tags would then be identically named.
Physical considerations
433MHz tags have some interesting characteristics. Well-constructed receivers can get a read of tags within about 100m, which is a long way for RFID. In addition, 433MHz wraps itself around obstacles very well, especially metal ones. We could even read tags in the boot (trunk) of a car travelling at 50km/h - the signal propagates from the rubber seal.
When installing a reader to monitor a zone, you need to adjust its location and sensitivity very carefully to maximize the reads from tags within your zone, but also to minimize reads from outside your zone. This might be done in HW or in SW configuration (like dropping all reads below a particular RSSI).
One idea might be to move the receiver away from the area where your tags are exiting as in the layout below (R is the reader):
+-------------------------+-----------+
| Warehouse | Exit |
| . |
| .
| R . R --->
| .
| . |
| | |
+-------------------------+-----------+
It pays to do a RF site survey and spend enough time to properly understand how tags and readers work in an area. Getting the physical installation right is critical.
Other thing to do is to consider physical constrictions such as corridors and doorways and treat them as choke-points - map logical zones to them. Put a reader (with directional receiver tuned to cover the constriction) and lower sensitivity in to cover the constriction.
What no tag-reads actually means
If my experience of RFID has taught me anything, it is that you can get spurious reads at any time, and you need to treat everything with a degree of suspicion. For example, you might have a few seconds of missing reads from a given tag - this can mean anything:
A user accidentally putting a metal tin over the tag
A fork lift truck getting between tag and reader
An RF collision
A momentary network congestion
The battery dying or fading out (remember to check the low-battery flag in tag reads and ensure the business has a process to replace old tags).
Tag destroyed by a pallet being pushed into it
Stollen by someone wanting to resell it for scrap (Not a joke - this actually happened)
Oh yeah, it may be that the tag moved off-site.
If the tag has not been heard of in, say, 5 minutes, odds are that it's off site.
In most business processes that you would use this active tag technology for, a short delay before the system decides the tag is off-site is acceptable.
Conclusions
Site survey: spend time experimenting with readers in different locations. Walk around the site with a tag and see what reads you are actually getting. Use this to:
Logically segment your site into zones and locate receivers to most accurately position tags in zones
It's easier to determine movement between zones using several receivers; if possible, instrument physical constrictions such as doors and corridors as portals. As part of your RFID implementation, you might even want to install new walls or fences to create such constrictions. Consider a passive RFID for portals.
Beware of metal, especially large expanses of it.
You have dirty data. You need to compute linear regressions on the RSSIs to spot trends over short periods; you need to be able to forgive a small number of missing tag reads
Make sure that there are business processes to handle dying batteries and sudden disappearances of tags.
Above all, this problem is best solved by getting the receivers installed in the best locations and configuring them carefully, then getting the software right. Trying to solve a bad site installation with software can cause premature ageing.
Disclosure: I worked 8 years for a major active RFID vendor.
Using directional antennas sounds like it may be a more reliable option, although this obviously depends on the precise layout of your premises.
As far as using your current omnidirectional receivers, there are a couple of options I can think of:
First one, and likely easiest, would be to collect some data on the average 'check-in' times you are seeing for on-site tags, possibly as a function of the number of on-site tags (if the number is likely to change dramatically - as your collision frequency will be related to the number of tags present). You can then analyse this data to see if you can choose a suitable cut-off time, after which you declare that a tag is no longer present.. Obviously exactly what cut-off you choose will depend on the data you see and your willingness to accept false positives - it could also be that any acceptable cut-off time lies outside your 3 minute window (although I suspect that if that is the case then your 3 minute window may not be viable).
Another, more difficult, option (or group of options more like), would be to utilise more historical information about each tag - for instance, look for tags whose signal strength gradually decreases and then disappears, or tags whose check-in time changes drastically, or perhaps utilise multiple receivers and look for patterns between receivers - such as tags which are only seen by one receiver and then disappear, or distinctive patterns of signal strength (indicating bearing) between receivers as tags go off-site.
Obviously the second option is really about looking for patterns, both over time and between receivers, and is likely to be much more labour (and analysis) intensive to implement. If you are able to capture enough good quality data you might be able to utilise machine-learning algorithms to identify relevant patterns.
We do this every day.
First question is: "How many tags do you have at a reader at any given time?". Collisions are more rare than you might think, but they do happen and tag over-population can be easily determined.
Our Software was written and might be using the same readers and tags that you are using. We set reader timeouts to determine when a tag is "away" or "offsite"; usually 30 seconds without the tag being read. Arrival of course is instantaneous when a tag is detected at the reader, then the tag is flagged "onsite".
We also have the option to use multiple readers; one at a gate and another on the parking lot or in the building for example. The gate reader has a short timeout. If a tag passes the gate reader, it is red and then times out very quickly to flag the tag as "offsite". If a tag is then read by any other reader, the tag is then considered "onsite".
I can post links if you think it would be helpful, else you can search for RFID Track. It's iOS App and there are settings posted for a demo server.
Peter

Where can I find a good introduction to locales

I have to write some code working with locales. Is there a good introduction to the subject to get me started?
First posted at Everything you need to know about Locales
A long time ago when I was a senior developer in the Windows group at Microsoft, I was sent to the Far East to help get the F.E. version of Windows 3.1 shipped. That was my introduction to localizing software – basically being pushed in to the deep end of the pool and told to learn how to swim. This is where I learned that localization is a lot more than translation.
Note: One interesting thing we hit - the infamous Blue Screen of Death switched the screen into text mode. You can't display Asian languages in text mode. So we (and by we I mean me) came up with a system where we put the screen in VGA mode, stored the 12 pt. courier bitmap at the resolution for just the characters used in BSoD messages, and rendered it that way. You kids today have it so easy J.
So keep in mind that taking locale into account can lead to some very unexpected work.
The Locale
Ok, so forward to today. What is a locale and what do you need to know? A locale is fundamentally the language and country a program is running under. (There can also be a variant added to the country but use of this is extremely rare.) The locale is this combination but you can have any combination of these two parts. For example a Spanish national in Germany would set es_DE so that their user interface is in Spanish (es) but their country settings are in German(DE). Do not assume location based on language or vice-versa.
The language part of the locale is very simple - that's what language you want to display the text in your app in. If the user is a Spanish speaker, you want to display all text in Spanish. But what dialect of Spanish - it is quite different between Spain and Mexico (just as in America we spell color while in England it's colour). So the country can impact the language used, depending on the combination.
All languages that support locale specific resources (which is pretty much all of them today) use a fall-back system. They will first look for a resource for the language_country combination. While es_DE has probably never been done, there often is an es_MX and es_ES. So for a locale set to es_MX it will first look for the es_MX resource. If that is not found, it then looks for the es resource. This is the resource for that language, but not specific to any country. Generally this is copied from the largest country (economically) for that language. If that is not found, it then goes to the "general" resource which is almost always the native language the program was written in.
The theory behind this fallback is you only have to define different resources for the more specific resources - and that is very useful. But even more importantly, when new parts of the UI are made and you want to ship beta copies or you release before you can get everything translated, well then the translated parts are in localized but the untranslated parts still display - but in English. This annoys the snot out of users in other countries, but it does get them the program sooner. (Note: We use Sisulizer for translating our resources - good product.)
The second half is the country. This is used primarily for number and date/time settings. This spans the gamut from what the decimal and thousand separator symbols are (12,345.67 in the U.S. is 12 345,67 in Russia) to what calendar is in use. The way to handle this is by using the run-time classes available for all operations on these elements when interacting with a user. Classes exist for both parsing user entered values as well as displaying them.
Keep a clear distinction between values the user enters or are displayed to the user and values stored internally as data. A number is a string in an XML file but in the XML file it will be "12345.67" (unless someone did something very stupid). Keep your data strongly typed and only do the locale specific conversions when displaying or parsing text to/from the user. Storing data in a locale specific format will bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Chinese
Chinese does not have an alphabet but instead has a set of glyphs. The People's Republic of China several decades ago significantly revised how to draw the glyphs and this is called simplified. The Chinese glyphs used elsewhere continued with the original and that is called traditional. It is the exact same set of characters, but they are drawn differently. It is akin to our having both a text A and a script A - they both mean the same thing but are drawn quite differently.
This is more of a font issue than a translation issue, except that wording and usage has diverged a bit, in part due to the differences in approach between traditional and simplified Chinese. The end result is that you generally do want to have two Chinese language resources, one zh_CN (PRC) and one zh_TW (Taiwan). As to which should be the zh resource - that is a major geopolitical question and you're on your own (but keep in mind PRC has nukes - and you don't).
Strings with substituted values
So you need to display the message Display ("The operation had the error: " + msg); No, no, no! Because in another language the proper usage could be Display("The error: " + msg + " was caused by the operation"); Every modern run-time library has a construct where you can have a string resource "The operation had the error: {0}" and will then substitute in your msg at {0}. (Some use a syntax other than {0}, {1}, …)
You store these strings in a resource file that can be localized. Then when you need to display the message, you load it from the resources, substitute in the variables, and display it. The combination of this, plus the number & date/time formatters make it easy to build up these strings. And once you get used to them, you'll find it easier than the old approach. (If you are using Visual Studio - download and install ResourceRefactoringTool to make this trivial.)
Arabic, Hebrew, and complex scripts.
Arabic & Hebrew are called b-directional because parts of it are right to left while other parts are left to right. The text in Arabic/Hebrew are written and read right to left. But when you get to Latin text or numbers, you then jump to the left-most part and read that left to right, then jump back to where that started and read right to left again. And then there is punctuation and other non-letter characters where the rules depend on where they are used.
Here's the bottom line - it is incredibly complex and there is no way you are going to learn how it works unless you take this on as a full-time job. But not to worry, again the run-time libraries for most languages have classes to handle this. The key to this is the text for a line is stored in the order you read the characters. So in the computer memory it is in left to right order for the order you would read (not display) the characters. In this way everything works normally except when you display the text and determine moving the caret.
Complex scripts like Indic scripts have a different problem. While they are read left to right, you can have cases where some combinations of letters are placed one above the other, so the string is no wider on the screen when the second letter is added. This tends to require a bit of care with caret movement but nothing more.
We even have cases like this in English where ae is sometimes rendered as a single æ character. (When the human race invented languages, they were not thinking computer friendly.)
Don't Over-Stress it
It seems like a lot but it's actually quite simple. In most cases you need to display text based on the closest resource you have. And you use the number & date/time classes for all locales, including your native one. No matter where you live, most computer users are in another country speaking another language - so localizing well significantly increases your potential market.
And if you're a small company, consider offering a free copy for people who translate your product. When I created Page 2 Stage I offered a free copy (list price $79.95) for translating it - and got 28 translations. I also met some very nice people online in the process. For an enterprise level product, many times a VAR in another country will translate it for you at a reduced rate or even free if they see a good market potential. But in these cases, do the first translation in-house to get the kinks worked out.
One resource I find very useful is the Microsoft Language Portal where you can put in text in English and if that text is in any of the Microsoft products, it will give you the translation Microsoft used for a given language. This can give you a fast high-quality translation for up to 80% of your program in many cases.
Удачи! (Good Luck)

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