About presenting localized publications

Dynamic Documentation is designed to present your localized content. Users change the set of publications displayed by selecting the user interface (UI) language.

There are two main factors to keep in mind when publishing content in different languages:
  • The default language for displaying publications is English.
  • The UI language determines which set of publications, by language, are presented.
  • Dynamic Documentation only handles content in which the language is identified by a two-letter language code. For example en is the language code for English-language content. Any other labels or codes need to be mapped to a two-letter language code by an implementer.

In Dynamic Documentation, English is the default user interface (UI) language. This not only means that the UI language is by default in English, but also all English-language publications are presented regardless of the UI language currently selected.

For content published to the site in non-English languages, the content is only visible after the visitor switches the UI language. For example, when a visitor to Dynamic Documentation switches to German as the UI language, then all publications in German will be visible. If a publication is not available in German, it will be listed in English with a icon that indicates that it was only available in the default English. We've also included dynamic messaging to indicate the availability of a topic or publication in either the selected or default language.

Language support in the UI

The system includes a user interface in five languages, namely English, Dutch, German, Chinese, Japanese. Other languages are also supported to display content, but the user interface is not translated to other languages. In order to support other languages more completely your implementer can add translated strings to the user interface in other languages.

We also support a number of languages that are read from right-to-left such as Arabic.