[TYPO3-english] pi_getLL - I guess I'm doing something wrong

[Martin Mädler]

Hi,

I manipulated the tt_address extension to have a few more fields 
including short_biography. To do so I added them to the db table and 
changed tca.php and locallang_tca.xml. The new fields show up in the 
backend with the right translation and work. So far so good.
I wanted to access the language variables from within the extension 
(i.e. class.tx_ttaddress_pi1.php) and found the function pi_getLL. But 
it doesn't seem to work right.
When I call

$this->pi_getLL('tt_address.short_biography', 'Alternate value')

all I get is the alternate value. But for values from pi1/locallang.xml 
the function seems to return the correct values.
For example

$this->pi_getLL('group1', 'A group title');

How can I get access to the language items of locallang_tca.xml or do I 
have to put the exact same values into locallang.xml and thus repeating 
them unnecessarily?


Thanks for your input
-Martin