I was just ordered to help translate a whole project people were been working on for months . I don’t know the whole back story, its probubly a request by the authorities.
Here in Serbia we use two types of writing systems: latin script, and cirilic script. They want to translate the project from serbian latin into serbian cirilic.
Serbian alphabet is phonetic (each pronunciation sound is represented by a single symbol, with few exceptions in the latin script). Each symbol in the latin script has a match in the cirilic script. So, everything is the same, only the symbols are different.
A thought came into my mind. Maybe I could use String.Replace node, and let it search through the alphabet. [a,b,c,d…] replace with [а,б,ц,д], but I’m really discoruaged. Is it possible to get all the string values in the whole project, or do I have to select each parameter one by one by category/family/type/instance ?
I found this on the forum, I don’t know if this works cause I don’t know all the texts listed in the element types in code. But maybe can be a starting point of the translation method.
Sadly you will need to update all text elements, then all parameter values, then all keynotes, then all… it’s a lot, and not something which works well in BIM. Certainly something which needs to be accounted for in the execution plan to prevent such additional services from ruining budgets and timelines.
For parameters, I recommend not replacing values outright, and instead make new shared parameters translated to the new alphabet, and transpose the translated values. This will make it so things can easily be moved back if need be, while ensuing that any other parameter names elsewhere in the office are aligned.
To add to that, project parameters are one of the most challenging out of those lists - they cannot be replaced by Revit API or Revit itself. You literally just have to add new ones, fix all the references to them manually (schedules, filters etc.) and finally move all the data before removing the old ones. As well as that then you have family parameters as well which have to be swapped at the family level, and you’ll lose associations etc.
You will be finding leftover elements in the project for a lot of time ultimately. I’ve never seen a translation go well in Revit mid-project. Challenge it if you can I’d say as it’s just poor planning to pull up the carpet mid production.
The difficulty in removal is another reason to leave them in place until well after the translation is over - you can leave it be and let the old and new live more or less side by side until the work is verified.
. I don’t know the whole back story, its probubly a request by the authorities.