Recall that the shape attribute is a string. You could have used a Symbol just as easily, but the example used a string to point out what you need to do to make national language translation work smoothly for your customers.

VA Smalltalk helps you translate your applications to different languages (like Spanish, German, or French) by providing features that separate translatable text into ASCII files. A customer who uses your shape part might want to perform this kind of translation, but would not want to translate the shape part's shape attribute, because that attribute is only used inside the part, and is never visible on a window. In fact, translating the shape attribute would cause the draw method to fail.

You can tell VA Smalltalk that the shape attribute is not translatable by implementing the following class method in MyShape:

Move the preceding method to your edit-time application, MyEditSamplePartsApp.

If you do not implement this method, VA Smalltalk will assume that all of your string attributes are translatable. If you have instance variables that are either strings or objects which contain strings and that are not translatable, you should implement this method.