Adding New Languages

This chapter provides an overview of the addition of new language definitions to the PeopleSoft database and discusses how to add new language codes to the system.

Understanding the Addition of New Language Definitions

PeopleSoft provides translations in several languages for all end-user objects, and these translations can be licensed from PeopleSoft. However, you can maintain data in your PeopleSoft database in as many languages as required, as long as the characters needed to represent these languages exist in the character set used to create your database. Of course, if you are running a Unicode database, you can maintain data in all languages supported by the Unicode standard in a single PeopleSoft database.

As shipped, PeopleTools includes definitions primarily for the languages for which translations are provided by PeopleSoft. Definitions for some additional languages are provided in anticipation of future translations. If you plan to use additional languages in your system, you must first define these languages in PeopleTools.

There are several places where you must define new languages before PeopleTools can use and recognize them. Work with your system administrator to ensure that you complete all the necessary steps described in this section before using a new language in PeopleTools.

Note. You do not need to perform these steps for any language for which PeopleSoft has provided translations.

Adding New Language Codes to the System

To add a new language code to the system:

1. Determine the PeopleSoft and ISO codes for your language.

2. Determine the default non-Unicode character set for your language.

3. Add new translate values to the LANGUAGE_CD field.

4. Add the new language to the PSLANGUAGES table.

5. Modify the PeopleSoft Configuration Manager Windows resources to include the new language in the Configuration Manager language selection dropdown list.

6. Modify the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture signon page to include a selection for the new language.

7. Add the text.properties and error.properties files to your new language.

8. Add the associated images to your new language.

9. Adjust toolbar buttons if necessary.

See Also

PeopleTools 8.46 Installation Guide for Your Database Platform, “Loading Translations”

Determining PeopleSoft and ISO Codes for Your Language

PeopleSoft does not currently use the ISO standard language and locale identifiers in PeopleTools. Instead, PeopleTools uses a proprietary three-letter language code that is determined and maintained by PeopleSoft. When adding a new language, you must choose a three-letter language code to represent the name of your language.

Because this code is used to key several PeopleTools database objects and the PeopleTools cache file, ensure that the language code contains only three uppercase US-ASCII letters—no numbers, spaces or accented characters.

The existing PeopleSoft language codes that have been allocated are as follows:

In our example, we choose QUE for Quechua (the QUE code is derived from the language) as our additional language.

Once you have chosen a three-letter code for your new language, you must determine which ISO locale corresponds to that language. ISO locales are comprised of two components, a language identifier and a territory identifier, separated by an underscore or a hyphen. Typically, the language component is in lowercase letters, and the territory identifier is in uppercase letters. For example, en_US is the ISO locale for U.S. English, and de_CH is the ISO locale for Swiss German.

The language component of the locale is the two-letter language code defined by the ISO 639 standard. The territory component of the locale is the two-letter country code defined by the ISO 3166 standard.

The territory portion of the ISO locale can be omitted if you want to indicate only a language and not a country-specific derivation of that language. In our example, we plan to add the Quechua language, so the appropriate ISO locale is qu. If we were adding a specific dialect of Quechua, we would use a specific ISO locale, such as qu_QU. But as long as we're adding the generic Quechua language, we can use qu as the complete ISO locale code.

In most situations, you can use only the language portion of the ISO locale. However, the two-component locale is important if you are planning to add derivations of existing languages, such as Mexican Spanish (es_MX) or Australian English (en_AU). You can easily create those language derivations from a related language using the PeopleTools Terminology Management tool.

Determining Appropriate Non-Unicode Character Sets

Although the majority of the PeopleSoft system runs in Unicode, some operations, such as file system operations on UNIX/Linux platforms and integration to some third-party products, cannot use Unicode characters. For each language in your database, you must determine which non-Unicode character set should be used when Unicode operations cannot be performed. The following table lists some of the non-Unicode character sets that are supported by PeopleTools. The complete list is in the PSCHARSETS table in your PeopleTools database. For each new language you add, select the appropriate non-Unicode character set from this table.

If you are not using a Unicode PeopleSoft database, the character set you select must be the character set you used to create your PeopleSoft database. For example, if you are using a DB2 UDB for OS/390 and z/OS database, you must specify the EBCDIC CCSID specified in your system's DSNZPARM configuration parameters.

Remember that this table is an excerpt from the complete list of character sets that are supported by PeopleTools. For the complete list, query the PSCHARSETS table in your SQL tool or in PeopleSoft Query.

Adding New Translate Values to the LANGUAGE_CD Field

Once you have determined the PeopleSoft three-letter language code for your new language, you must add it to the Translate table so that other PeopleTools utilities and PeopleSoft applications can recognize it.

To add the language code to the Translate table:

1. In PeopleSoft Application Designer, open the field named LANGUAGE_CD.

2. Select File, Definition Properties.

3. Move to the Translate Values tab and click the Add button.

   The Add Translate Table Value dialog box appears.

4. Add the new three-letter language code and a description of your new language.

   Use an effective date of 01/01/1900 to ensure that the language is always accessible to your applications. When adding the long and short names for your new language code, enter the name of the language as it is referred to in the base language of your database. Once you have defined the translate value for your language code, you can translate it into each language.

5. Save the changes.

In this example, the database base language is English, so Quechua is used as both the long and short name of the new language. Once the new language is defined, Quechua translators might want to translate this new value into Norwegian as qheshwa.

Adding New Languages to the PSLANGUAGES Table

You can update and add the languages used by the PeopleSoft system to the PSLANGUAGES table using the Manage Installed Languages page. To access this page, select PeopleTools, Utilities, International, Languages.

Use the Manage Installed Languages page to specify:

• Languages in use.

  The PSLANGUAGES table is used by many PeopleTools utilities to determine which languages defined in the database are actually in use, rather than being defined but unused.

• Default non-Unicode character sets.

  The PSLANGUAGES table also provides a mapping to a default non-Unicode character set that is used to represent that language when a Unicode representation is not possible, for example, during some file system operations.

• Verity locale for search indexing.

• Spell check languages for language codes.

  You also use the PSLANGUAGES table to select the language of the spell check dictionary that is associated with a given language code. The spell check language that you select for a language code is the default spell check dictionary that is associated with that language when the user signs on to the system in that language. The user can override the default spell check dictionary through the My Personalizations option on the homepage.

  See Enterprise PeopleTools 8.46 PeopleBook: Using PeopleSoft Applications.

• Character sets for encoding Comma Separated-Formatted (CSV) query results.

  The PeopleSoft system downloads query results to a file in comma separated value format (CSV). You can use the PSLANGUAGES table to select a charset value for a given language code to encode the results.

Language Code	Enter the PeopleSoft three-letter language code from the PSXLATITEM table.
Enabled	Select the check box to indicate the language that is in use. When this check box is selected, login with the language is allowed. Normally, this check box is selected automatically during the process of loading translations into the database.
ISO Locale	Use the lookup to select the ISO locale code from the PSLOCALEDEFN table. The code consists of an ISO 639 language code, optionally followed by an ISO 3166 country code.
Default Character Set	Use the lookup to select the character set from the PSCHARSETS table. The default character set determines the default encoding for input and output files.
Verity Locale Mapping	Use the drop-down list to select which Verity locale should be used when indexing data for search in this language. If the language is not in the drop-down list for Verity Locale Mapping, select englishx This mapping determines the locale to use for building search collections and searching for data.
Spell Check Language	Use the drop-down list to select the spell check language from the PSXLATITEM table. This enables you to select the language of the spell check dictionary that is associated with a given language code.
Windows Character Set	Use the Lookup option to select a Microsoft codepage to use to encode comma separated value (CSV) formatted query results for the corresponding language code. The charset must be valid for Java encoding and mime-type, or downloads will fail with an error. The default value for all language codes is CP1252.
Verity Character Set	Select the character set for the Verity search engine to use for its internal encoding in the given language. Normally you should not modify the value in this field.

Note. You can override the information specified on the Manage Installed Languages page using the Look and Feel tab on the Web Configuration page.

See Also

Enterprise PeopleTools 8.46 PeopleBook: Internet Technology

Modifying Configuration Manager Windows Resources

PeopleSoft Configuration Manager provides a list of languages that are available to users for their PeopleTools Windows client and Application Designer sessions. This list is embedded in the Windows Resource File for PeopleSoft Configuration Manager itself.

To add your new language to the list of languages in PeopleSoft Configuration Manager:

1. In \SRC\RES\ENG\PSCFG, edit the file pscfg.rc using a text editor.

   This file stores the list of languages used in the Display tab of the PeopleSoft Configuration Manager. These languages are stored as strings with the name IDS_LANGx, where x is a sequential number. To add your new language, find the next available IDS_LANG entry and change the text to match your new language using the format LanguageCode – Description. Then, update the entry IDS_NUMLANGUAGES to specify the new highest IDS_LANG entry that you used.

2. Copy \SRC\INC\version.rcx to \SRC\RES\ENG\PSCFG.

3. Use the MAKEALTL.BAT batch file to compile PSCFGENG.DLL, (run, “makealtl ENG PSCFG”) and copy the DLL file to the %PS_HOME%\bin\client\winx86 directory.

   If you plan to translate Windows resources into the new language, create another directory structure under \SRC\RES\ to include the new translations. To do so, copy the existing \SRC\RES\ENG tree (or use another language if you prefer not to use English as the source for your translations) to a new directory under the existing \SRC\RES\ directory, matching the PeopleSoft three-letter code for the new language. Then, translate the strings in the RC files in your new directories, and use the MAKEALTL.BAT batch file to compile the alternate language DLLs (for instance, run “makealtl QUE PSCFG”) and copy the DLL files to the %PS_HOME%\bin\client\winx86 directory.

Modifying the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture Signon Page

The PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture enables users to select their sign-in language by selecting the language from the Signon page. This page is maintained on the web server as a static HTML file and is not generated from a PeopleTools page definition. You must edit this HTML file to add the new language code.

Work with your web server administrator to edit the signin.html file on your PeopleTools web server. The signin.html file contains an HTML table that lists each PeopleTools language. Add a new entry to this table to reference the name of your new language in the new language. If the language does not use Latin characters, you might want to reference an image that contains the name of the language to ensure that all users can correctly see the language name, even if their web browser settings are not configured appropriately for that language.

In the following example, we added the lines shown in boldface to the signin.html file. Note the Japanese entry demonstrating how to reference an image that contains the language name for a non-Latin language:

<tr>
   <td>&nbsp;</td>
   <td><a HREF="<%=servletLoc%>?cmd=login&languageCd=JPN"><img src="
<%=psHome%>/images/kanji.gif" width="37" height="15" align="bottom" 
alt="Japanese" border="0"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
   <td class="PSHYPERLINK"><a HREF="<%=servletLoc%>?cmd=login&languageCd=POR">
Portugu&ecirc;s</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
   <td class="PSHYPERLINK"><a HREF="<%=servletLoc%>?cmd=login&languageCd=DUT">
Nederlands</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td class="PSHYPERLINK"><a HREF=
"<%=servletLoc%>?cmd=login&languageCd=QUE">Quechua</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
</tr>

Adding Text and Error Properties Files for Languages

Copy the text.properties and errors.properties to two files named after your three-letter language code in this format: filename_xxx.properties, where xxx is the three-letter language code. For example, for Quechua, the filenames would be text_QUE.properties and errors_QUE.properties.

Note. The text in these files can be translated into your target language.

Note. After you have added the text and error properties files, you must restart the web server.

Text Property File Variables

You must set the following properties in the text.properties file:

Note. Do not translate any of the values you enter for these properties.

The following example shows a text.properties file entry for French:

fr_active=-s
direction=ltr
alignstart=left
alignend=right

File Format

Properties files are saved in a special format. US-ASCII Unicode characters must be represented by a Java-Style Unicode Escape Sequence in the format \udddd, where dddd represents the hexadecimal value of the Unicode character.

native2ascii

The native2ascii utility, a part of the Sun Microsystems JDK (Java Development Kit), can be used to transform your properties files into the correct format after it has been translated.

For example, to convert a non-European text.properties file, you will need to run the following:

native2ascii −encoding <encoding> <sourcefile> <destination file>

Note. Use the destination properties files that have the Java-style encoding.

Note. For more information about the native2ascii utility, refer to the Sun Microsystems online documentation.

Adding Associated Images in the New Language

To add the new images in the new language, do the following:

1. Create a new directory named after your 3-letter language code in the PORTAL\ps\images directory.

2. Copy the following three files from the images directory into the \images\<language code> directory:

   • customerEmployeeSupplier.gif

   • PT_PROCESSING.gif

   • tagLine.gif

3. Change the filename to _<language code> before the .gif extension.

   For example, your \images\QUE directory would contain these files: customerEmployeeSupplier_QUE.gif, PT_PROCESSING_QUE.gif, and tagLine_QUE.gif.

Adjusting Truncated Toolbar Buttons

After you add a new language you may find that images appear truncated on PeopleSoft toolbar buttons. To remedy truncated toolbar buttons, adjust the width of the styleclass.

Note. All styleclasses that relate to toolbar buttons start with PSPUSHBUTTONTB*.

To adjust truncated toolbar buttons:

1. Open the stylesheet that contains the truncated styleclass.

2. Open the styleclass.

3. Click the Margin tab.

4. In the Width field, adjust the values.