You asked, We answered..."Localization"

 

The ORK Team has been writing the content for TechNet for quite some time now, and it came our way through the usual channels, that people were wondering how does our content get into the hands of those, that English is not the first language.

 

Do we localize our content, and if we do, how is that all done and how can I find it?

 

To answer: Yes, the first draft of what we write is in English - sorry. Sometimes I may think of the words in French or German as I’m compiling an article, but that was perhaps because the last song I was listening to the night before was in that language, and those childhood languages of mine still float around my head.

After our team completes the English content, another team takes over to go through and localize it.

There are actually a lot of languages that the content is localized in: German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Russian, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean. That’s a lot of work!

So how does this content appear, if you were choosing to read it in another language?

Well first thing is to check the localization browser cookie in Internet Explorer. Is it set to EN-US (that would be US English) or perhaps it is set to something like DE-DE (that would be “Deutschland”, translated=Germany-German).

If the content exists, the page will appear in the language of your browser cookie.

For example if the library content you were looking for was supposed to be in German, but the page doesn’t exist in German, English content will be shown. If English content doesn’t exist because it was not created in English, then a dialog page will show the standard html code 404, meaning the content was not found.

There are a lot of Resource Centers on TechNet that you can get to, in another language. For example the following links are shown in German based on the ../de-de/ listed in the url:

· Office 2010 https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc326108(office.14).aspx

· SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc288070(office.14).aspx)

· SharePoint Server 2010 Betahttps://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc303422(office.14).aspx

· Project Server 2010 Beta https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc303399(office.14).aspx

· Search Server 2010  https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/dd183108(office.14).aspx

As we continue to add more content for the Office 2010 Release, those pages will in turn get localized as well.

On a side note, don’t forget the built in translator in Office 2010 for any of those words that you might want to translate on your own.

 

Translation Built into Office 2010