Locales for Translation

When submitting an item for translation the target language is identified by a code so the language service provider knows what language to translate the item into and return. For example, fr represents French and de represents German.

These codes can be extended for more regional dialects. For example, de-LI is the code for German as it is spoken in Liechtenstein and de-LU is the code for German as it is spoken in Luxemburg. But if the language service provider doesn't support a regional dialect, then the code provided is truncated to the two character base language. For de-LI and de-LU the code would be truncated to de, for example.

If the language service provider supports one regional dialect but not all, it may substitute. For example, ms-BN is the code for Malay as spoken in Brunei, but if the language service provider doesn't support that dialect, it may switch to a dialect it does support, such as ms-MY, which is the code for Malay as it is spoken in Malaysia. If the language service provider doesn't make a distinction between dialects, for example en-BZ for English as spoken in Belize and en-JM for English as spoken in Jamaica, then it will truncate to the base language, in this case en for English.