Supporting a new language

To support a new language to IBM WebSphere Portal you add resource bundles and, where applicable, JSPs for the new language. Some JSPs use resource bundles; others, such as help JSPs, are translated directly. Then you update the list of available languages by adding the new language to the portal. You do this by using the The XML configuration interface. Use the CreateLanguage.xml example to add the new language for the portal. The new language is then listed in the language selection menu boxes that are available in administration portlets, or for example, in Edit My Profile, Preferred language.

The new language will be available only to portlets that you add to your portal, if these portlets support the newly added language and if you make the required language files available. None of the WebSphere Portal user interface or messages will be translated to the new language.

 

Add resource bundles for a new language

Resource bundles are used to store text displayed in JSPs or text used in Java code. In WebSphere Portal, resource bundles are located in the JAR file wp.ui.jar in the nls directory inside the JAR file. The JAR file wp.ui.jar is located under the following directory:

To add new resource bundles for additional languages, place them into the following directory:

The naming convention for resource bundles is [bundle]_[language]_[country]_[variant].properties. The ISO standard ISO-639 is used for the language codes of most languages. For Hebrew the old language code iw is used. The ISO standard ISO-3166 is used for the country/region codes. WebSphere Portal supports the use of [variant], although resource bundles supplied with the portal do not use it.

If your portal configuration includes Lotus Collaborative Services, add a new CSRes_language.properties file for each additional language to the following directory:

WebSphere Portal uses properties files called by the Java class java.util.ResourceBundle to store text rendered in JSPs. The Java mechanism searches for the resource bundles in the following order:

  1. [bundle]_[language]_[country]_[variant].properties

  2. [bundle]_[language]_[country].properties

  3. [bundle]_[language].properties

  4. [bundle].properties

In WebSphere Portal, the default bundles [bundle].properties are in English.

To add a resource bundle, proceed with the following steps:

  1. Copy an existing resource bundle and translate it

  2. Name it according to the naming convention for resource bundles

  3. Convert it into Unicode with the Native-to-ASCII converter native2ascii which comes as part of JDK. For more detail on native2ascii see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/tooldocs/solaris/native2ascii.html.

 

Add JSPs for a new language

Some JSPs that contain mostly text, such as help JSPs, are translated directly which means that the text is contained in the JSP and not in a resource bundle. For JSPs that do not use resource bundles, copy and translate an existing JSP and store it in the appropriate location.

The location of JSPs can be, for example, jsp/[mime-type]/[language]/[country]/[variant]/files.jsp. For instance, existing help JSPs are already translated in WebSphere Portal and placed in the relevant [language]and [country] subdirectories. When deciding where to store new JSPs, consider how the portal locates a JSP for rendering its content.

The following is an example of the order in which directories are searched, where path1 is a user-defined path, ie5 is the markup version (here: Internet Explorer 5), and the locale is en_US:

  1. /html/path1/ie5/en_US/mytemplate.jsp

  2. /html/path1/ie5/en/mytemplate.jsp

  3. /html/path1/ie5/mytemplate.jsp

  4. /html/path1/en_US/mytemplate.jsp

  5. /html/path1/en/mytemplate.jsp

  6. /html/path1/mytemplate.jsp

  7. /html/en_US/mytemplate.jsp

  8. /html/en/mytemplate.jsp

  9. /html/mytemplate.jsp

  10. /mytemplate.jsp

This means that if the user language is not supported, the portal will choose the file in the locale independent location, which in the example is the English file.

 

Related information

 

Parent topic:

Language support