7 Localization

This chapter provides an overview of localization options for an Oracle WebCenter deployment.

About Localization in Oracle WebCenter

All Oracle WebCenter products are fully Unicode-compliant and use UTF-8 encoding.

For additional details on localization and Oracle WebCenter, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

For developer documentation on localizing custom Web services and portlets, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Localization and the Oracle WebCenter Interaction User Interface

Out of the box, the Oracle WebCenter Interaction user interface is localized into eleven languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Each portal user can choose her preferred language by changing her locale under My Account > Edit Locale Settings. For example, if a portal user changes her locale setting to any of the German locales (Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, or Switzerland), the user interface language will change to German.

You can create additional languages for the Oracle WebCenter Interaction user interface. For details, see Adding Custom Languages.

Localization and Oracle WebCenter Collaboration and Oracle BPM Suite

Oracle WebCenter Collaboration is localized to the same eleven languages as the Oracle WebCenter Interaction user interface. Oracle BPM Suite is localized to a subset of those languages.

It is possible to add custom languages to these applications; however, these customizations are not recommended unless done by Oracle professional services. To engage Oracle professional services, contact your Oracle representative.

Localization and Search

The Search index is stored in UTF-8 Unicode and supports 62 languages.

The Search engine supports advanced stemming and tokenization for the following 23 languages:

Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
French
Finnish
German
Greek
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian (Bokmål)
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

In addition to those 23 languages, the Search engine provides basic tokenization support for an additional 39 languages.

The Search engine languages are hard-coded and cannot be customized.

Localizing Portal Objects

You can localize the names and descriptions of portal objects. For example, if you create a portlet with the name "Travel Portlet," it is possible to associate the name "Dienstreise Portlet" with the portlet for display to German locales.

Names and descriptions are added or modified using the administrative user interface for each object. When the object is opened in the administrative editor, the Properties and Names page allows you to specify a name and description for any available language.

For details on editing object properties, see the Oracle WebCenter Interaction online help.

The Localization Manager

You can export and import localized names and descriptions in bulk with the Localization Manager. Names and descriptions of objects are exported from the Oracle WebCenter Interaction database into an XML file. The XML file contains name and description strings and their translations. Translations are added or edited in the XML file, and then the names and descriptions imported into the Oracle WebCenter Interaction database using the Localization Manager.

This is a small sample of exported names and descriptions:

<localizationtable>
  <languages count='9'>
    <language>de</language>
    <language>en</language>
    <language>es</language>
    <language>fr</language>
    <language>it</language>
    ...
  </languages>
  <segments count='554'>
    <segment stringid='0' itemid='1' classid='2'>
      <source language='en'>Administrators Group</source>
      <target language='de'>Administratorengruppe</target>
      <target language='en'></target>
      <target language='es'>Grupo Administradores</target>
      <target language='fr'>Groupe d'administrateurs</target>
      <target language='it'>Gruppo Amministratori</target>
    ...
    </segment>
    <segment stringid='1' itemid='1' classid='2'>
      <source language='en'>WCI Administrators Group</source>
      <target language='de'>WCI-Administratorengruppe</target>
      <target language='en'></target>
      <target language='es'>Grupo Administradores de WCI</target>
      <target language='fr'>Groupe d'administrateurs WCI</target>
      <target language='it'>Gruppo Amministratori WCI</target>
    ...
    </segment>
    ...
  </segments>
</localizationtable>

In the exported XML:

<languages> contains all of the user interface languages supported in the portal.
<segments> contains one or more <segment> nodes. The count element shows the total number of name or description strings in the portal.
<segment> contains a single name or description string and its translations. The contained <source> node is the original, to be translated text. The <target> nodes are the translations of the <source> node text.

The <language> element of each node is the ISO 639-1 two letter identifier for the given language.

Adding Custom Languages

This section covers adding custom languages to the Oracle WebCenter Interaction portal user interface. Adding custom languages to other Oracle WebCenter products, such as Oracle WebCenter Collaboration must be done by Oracle professional services.

Adding a custom language to the Oracle WebCenter Interaction portal user interface is a four step process:

Create a directory for the new language. For details, see Adding the Language Directory.
Add style sheets.
Translate online help
Translate Javascript language files.

Caution:

Customizing OpenFoundation language resources is currently not supported.

Adding the Language Directory

The portal component loads supported languages based on the contents of the directory PT_HOME/ptportal/version/i18n. This directory contains one subdirectory for each supported language, each named with the ISO-639-1 language code.

The first step in adding a new language to the portal is to add a directory for that language to PT_HOME/ptportal/version/i18n. To do this:

Create a new directory under PT_HOME/ptportal/version/i18n. The directory must be named the ISO-639-1 language code of the language you intend to add.
Copy the contents of the i18n/en directory to the new directory.
Restart the portal. The new language is now available on the My Account > Edit Locale Settings page.

Adding Language Style Sheets

The second step in adding a new language to the portal is to add style sheets for that language.

Each language file in the \ptimages\tools\cssmill\prop-text folder has language-specific values for font style, font size, text style, etc. This design makes it easy to change the default font for each language. For example, if you want the default font for the Japanese user interface to be Tahoma, add Tahoma to the "ja" language file in the prop-text folder.

After adding a language file, you must also edit the build.xml file to generate the new language style sheets.

For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User Interface Customization Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Adding an Online Help Language

Online help is located on the Image Service under each product's private/help directory. For example, the Oracle WebCenter Interaction online help files are located in imageserver/plumtree/portal/private/help. Under this directory are two directories, std for standard online help and 508 for Section 508-compliant help. Under those directories are directories for each supported language.

For example, the standard English online help for Oracle WebCenter Interaction is located in imageserver/plumtree/portal/private/help/std/en.

Online help is compiled using RoboHelp X5 for European languages and RoboHelp 2002 for Asian languages. RoboHelp projects are made available upon request. Contact Oracle Support at http://www.oracle.com/support/index.html for details.

Adding Javascript Language Files

You must localize string files for various Javascript user interface components when adding a language to the portal. The following Javascript components require you to add a string file with each added language:

jscontrols
jsdatepicker
jsutil

These components are located on the Image Service, under imageserver/plumtree/common/private/js. The string files are located under each component's directory, in LATEST/strings.

To add a string file for the new language:

Copy the English file to a file in the strings file suffixed with the ISO-639-1 code of the language to be added. For example, to add a Czech string file to jscontrols, copy LATEST/strings/PTControls-en.js and save it as LATEST/strings/PTControls-cz.js.
Translate the copied string file to the language being added.