Need help with translating Content Server

Alexandru Ghita · 2021-09-16T09:33:37+00:00

There was an error rendering this rich post.

Hello,

I'm trying to translate Content Server into another language, I did the localization procedure with the python script that they offer, I have a language pack prepared for translation, the question is, what exactly do I need to translate?

I have .properties, .htm, .js and .css files in those directories, is it enough to translate the .properties files or every piece of content/text has to be translated?

Any other tips for this procedure? Thanks! 😀

Note: I verified before that OTCS doesn't support my language..

Find more posts tagged with

Content Services

Content Suite Platform

Content Server

Comments

Ferdinand Prantl

This should be documented in the Localisation SDK.

You can start with the .properties files. Properly written features for have all localisable strings there.

Smart UI is executed in the browser. Its localisation files can be found in **/bundles/nls/**/*.js.

Alexandru Ghita

Thank you for your answer @Ferdinand Prantl , by Localization SDK do you mean the Toolkit? I only managed to find "Localization Toolkit for Content Server 21.3" on the My Support platform, there is a documentation but it only explains how to prepare a language pack for translation in the new language with a Python script.

Also, what is the behaviour of the .properties files? After their translation will it still be necessary to translate .htm files?

Thanks again! ☺️

Alexandru Ghita

Hello @Ferdinand Prantl, with a Python script I translated every .properties file, and installed the new package but only with the .properties file changed, but on Classic and Smart View nothing changed, everything is still in English, I tried restarting and everything.

Does this mean we need to work on the .htm and .js files exclusively? Also, where can I find more info about this?

Thanks!

Greg Griffiths

@Alexandru Ghita all the Properties files do is provide the translation, you still have some configuration to do to make the language available to users and then select the language in the users settings. Have you done that as well ?

Alexandru Ghita

Hello @Greg Griffiths I managed to make the language package work with the .properties files translated, thank you.

My problem now is that in my language there are a lot of diacritics/accents, so after enabling the package, some characters appear like this in Content Server:

I took a look at other language packages, in Portuguese specifically, and I saw that accents are written in their respective unicode value, like this for example : \u00e7

So I changed all of the accents in my .properties files with a python script into their unicode value, but when I installed the new package, nothing changed.

NOTE : When I open the .properties file, the accents that were changed to unicode still look like the normal letter to me, not in the form of \u00e7 or something similar. Also, in the .ini file I have these lines

LL_ENCODING=UTF-8
LL_MULTIBYTE=TRUE
LL_INTLSTRINGS=TRUE
HTMLCharset=UTF-8

Do any of these lines need to be changed? Any help? Thanks!

Greg Griffiths

I would change one label you know directly in the PROPERTIES file to match the format of what you saw in the Portuguese file and then restart the server and test to see if that works.

Alexandru Ghita

Hey @Greg Griffiths thanks for the help, I managed to solve this issue, every accent had to be replaced with it's C/C++/Java source code form, more info on specific accents on fileformat.info (that's where I took my characters).

But another problem that I have is with Smart UI, pretty much all of Content Server Classic View is translated, but in Smart UI I tried translating some specific texts in the .js files (that's where I found them), but after updating the language pack, the modification took no effect, and the text that I changed was nowhere else, except the .js file that I modified.

Any help on how to translate Smart View properly? :D

Greg Griffiths

@Alexandru Ghita glad to hear you are making progress. SmartUI has its own language files which will need to be developed and deployed separately, they are a mix of JavaScript and an OScript module (to deploy the JS files). You can find our more in the SmartUI SDK e.g. https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll?func=ll&objId=77947990&objAction=browse&viewType=1

Alexandru Ghita

Thank you @Greg Griffiths ! I managed to pretty much translate 80% of Smart UI already with an automatic script, thanks again!

Ferdinand Prantl

I see that you already figured it out. Nevertheless, some more words about it.

You need to translate all .properties files in order to localise the most of Classic UI and APIs.
You need to translate all "**/bundles/nls/**/*.js" files in order to localise Smart UI.
The encoding of the textual files with the localisation strings should be UTF-8 without BOM.

I do not know about other files in the language pack template, but when you look to them, you will probably see some localisable strings for translation.

Details

I have not used the localisation kit myself. I know that there is a script there which creates the file structure for a specified locale. The rest should be localising the files.

The .properties files are used by:

Internal OScript APIs, which are used for many operation in the server, be it data generation on success or error messages on failure.
WebLingo pages, which together create the Classic UI interface.
WS and REST API responses, which togetherr create the public API for applications outside CS.

I do not know, why you found .css and .htm files there. But some part of Classic UI might have strings coded there. When you look inside, you will see yourself if they should be localised or not. Probably yes, if they are included in the SDK.

The .js files will be many. They will be loaded to the web browser. Probably most of them will contain Smart UI localisation strings, but there might be some for Classic UI. Those specific for Smart UI will be on the path "**/bundles/nls/**/*.js", the others will be for Classic UI. The script that generates language pack will prepare the .js files for Smart UI, so that they will be created in the right directories (bundles/nls/cs-cz for cs-CZ, for example) and that they will contain right module delarations ("csui/widgets/search.forms/impl/nls/cs-cz/lang" for cs-CZ, for example). Only the string values should be translated.

CS 16.2.0 or newer expects the textual files in UTF-8. If you have some conversion tools, you can use them to store entities like \u00e7 to the .js files, but editing of such content by hand will be cumbersome, especially if there are many non-ASCII characters. The easiest way is to set up your editor to save UTF-8 without BOM.

I attached technical documentation about Smart UI localisation, which is in the Smart UI SDK. The chapter "How to translate the language pack template" is for the translators. Tests can be performed on the CS by unpacking the langauge pack to the langpkgstaging directory, installing it in the CS administration, enabling it globally by the admin and selecting in user settings by a user.

localization.txt

Alexandru Ghita

Thanks so much for your info @Ferdinand Prantl , this will surely be helpful for future users that will try to localize OTCS.

SeanR_Murphy613

Hi Alexandru, may I ask what language you created your pack for? Did you make the translations yourself or did you use machine translation?

FYI, Cassia Content Management also develops language packs for Content Server. We use human translation for packs.

https://www.cassiacm.com/language-pack-development/

We also have a solution extension (SolEx) to extend multilingualization to metadata and other areas to provide a complete UI in the users native language. The OpenText Translator is that product.