Defining Languages

Your product may support multiple languages. For example, the field labels, input text, and even outputs and reports can be configured to appear in a localized language. A language code for every potential language exists in the system to supply this information in various languages.

Select Admin > General > Language to define a language.

This is a standard All-in-One portal.

When Language Enable is checked, the system adds a row for this language whenever a row is added in another language. For example, if you add a new currency code, the system will create language specific record for each language that has been enabled. You would only enable multiple languages if you have users who work in multiple languages. Languages that are configured as enabled, appear in the Switch Language dashboard zone.

Note: For on premise applications, the login page displays all the languages that are enabled, allowing the user to toggle the login instructions in that language. The list of enabled languages is captured on the server at startup time. If a new language is enabled, contact your server administrator to refresh the server in order to see the new language displayed in the login page.
The Locale is a string containing three portions:
  • ISO language code (lower case, required)
  • ISO country code (upper case, optional)
  • Variant (optional).

Hyphens separate the various portions, and multiple variants are possible.

The locale along with the collator strength control how the contents of grids and search results are sorted by the Java virtual machine (JVM) on your web server: The specific JVM in use by your particular hardware/OS configuration constrains the available Locales. Validating the Locale against the JVM is outside the scope of this transaction. This means you are responsible for choosing valid Locales.

Additionally, external systems that communicate with the product and provide a language use a format that matches the locale. For example in the Accept-Language header for REST web service calls, a requested language is provided.

The following are examples of valid locales:

Locale Comments
en-US American English
en-AU Australian English
pt-BR Brazilian Portuguese
fr-FR-EURO European French
ja-JP Japanese

The Collator Strength parameter is used for the Java collation API . This parameter controls whether, for example, upper and lower-case characters are considered equivalent, or how accented characters are sorted. Valid values for collator strength are PRIMARY, SECONDARY, TERTIARY, and IDENTICAL. If you leave this field blank, Java will use its default value for the language. We'd like to stress that the impact of each value depends on the language.

Please see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/Collator.html for more information about the collator strength for your language.

Display Order indicates if this language is written Left to Right or Right to Left.

Note that all administrative control tables and system metadata that contain language-specific columns (e.g., a description) reference a language code. In addition, other tables may reference the language as a specific column. For example, on the User record you indicate the preferred language of the user.