Localizing CMS Console

In this article, you are going to learn how to localize the CMS Console GUI by using Experience Management Localization Tool.

Note: the Experience Management Console GUI has been translated into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Russian, Swedish and Ukrainian.

To localize the CMS Console GUI, you are supposed to:

1. Set up the localization environment.
2. Translate the strings in localization files with Localization Tool.
3. Manage the translation as you go.
   
4. Switch the GUI language in the CMS Console.
5. Export the new GUI localization as a package.
   

Tip: For a quick guide on updating an existing GUI localization, see "Updating Localizations".

Technical Introduction

The strings for the CMS Console are stored in XML files located in the folder ~/Composite/localization. All the strings are in English (United States) by default, which can be seen from their filenames: they include the "en-US" language code as their part.

Translated strings must be stored at  ~/App_Data/Composite/LanguagePacks/ in the subfolder named after the target language's code.

For example: ~/App_Data/Composite/LanguagePacks/da-DK/

Instead of the default "en-US", the filenames must include the language code relevant to the target language of localization: For example: "fr-CA".

~/App_Data/Composite/LanguagePacks/da-DK/Composite.Web.VisualEditor.fr-CA.xml

The Localization Tool conveniently gives access to the strings in those files and takes care of creating and properly naming the files with the translated strings.