Internationalization

Supported languages and regions

When you configure the portal site, you choose from a list of locales (cultures with regions) that the back office installation supports. A culture with region is a culture that specifies both a language and a region; for example, en-US is English for the United States. A culture without region specifies only a language; for example, fr is French. In order to use a culture to control the formatting of numbers, currency, and dates, it must include a region, as in our en-US example. For translations of labels, a culture can omit the region, as in our fr example.

When configuring a portal, you can select all the cultures with regions that the portal site will support. You can also choose one of the culture/regions as the default for the site. If no configuration is performed, the en-US culture/region is used.

Using browser language preferences

When a portal user first visits the site, the language preferences contained in the user’s web browser are checked for use on the portal. The best match is made, based on the list of culture/regions that the portal site is configured to support. If no exact match is found, the first match on the language is used. For example, if the browser has en-NZ as its only entry, and the portal supports en-US, then en-US is selected as the culture/region for the portal. If no language match is found, then the default locale that was specified during portal configuration is selected. The portal uses this culture/region name for text translations and for the formatting of numbers, currency, and dates.

Overriding browser preferences

On the portal Login page, the user can select a different culture/region from a drop-down list. The list includes all cultures with regions that the portal site is configured to support. If a portal user makes a selection from this menu, a cookie is created to remember this selection. The value in this cookie overrides the browser selections.

Currency symbol

As described above, the selected culture controls the formatting of numbers, currency, and dates. The culture also controls the currency symbol, when used. However, the currency values returned from the back office are in the currency that is defined for the customer record. To resolve this, after the culture has been set based on the rules defined above, the currency symbol is overridden to be the symbol for the currency defined on the customer record. This must be an ISO currency.