Creating localization resources

Localization resources for a process application are contained in localization resource bundles, which are a set of files that define key-value pairs for all the strings that are displayed in the application. For each supported language, a file contains translated values for all of the keys.

1. Open Process Designer and your process application or toolkit in the Designer view.
2. In the library, click the plus sign next to User Interface and select Localization Resource.
3. Provide a name for your new resource bundle and click Finish.
4. Optional: If you opened the desktop Process Designer (deprecated), you can add each of the language locales that you will translate your user interface into by clicking Add and selecting each locale from the list.
5. For each translatable string in your application, enter a translation key and a default value for that key. The default value is the value that is displayed if no translation is available.
6. After you have defined all of your translation keys, you can export the resource bundle for translation. Click Export to export the existing set of keys to a .zip file to which you will add the corresponding translated properties files.
7. If you are in the web editor, or if you did not perform Step 4, you need to manually create a new properties file for each language locale that you will translate your user interface into. For each language that you want your application to support, create a copy of the exported properties file, renaming it according to the language that it will be supporting. For example, if your default properties file is my_application.properties and you want your application to support Japanese, create a copy of the file called my_application_ja.properties.
   Note: Language support also extends to specific countries. For example, different locale options are provided for English (en_US, en_CA), French (fr and fr_CA), and Portuguese (pt and pt_BR). If you add a locale for a language variant, such as British or Australian English, or Colombian Spanish, you must update the available.locales mashup configuration property from the WebSphere® Application Server administration console. Make sure that you write the values for this property in lowercase, separate the value elements with a dash (-), and separate the values with commas, as follows: en-gb, en-au, es-co

   For more information about custom properties for Process Portal, see Configuring mashups custom properties for Process Portal.

   The file naming scheme follows that of the Java specification, and is as follows:

   my_application_ll.properties

   where ll is the lowercase language code (fr, pt, en, and so on), or

   my_application_ll_CC.properties

   where ll is the lowercase language code (fr, pt, en, and so on), and CC is the uppercase country code (CA, US, BR, and so on).
8. Have each of the files translated into the corresponding languages.
   Note: The files must meet the following requirements:

   • The key-value pairs must conform to the format required by the Java specification. For more information, see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html#load(java.io.InputStream).
   • Characters that cannot be directly represented in this encoding must be escaped by using Unicode escapes as defined in the Java Specification. For example,for the German character Umlaut you would use the unicode escape sequence \u00dc as the value in your key-value pair. There are tools you can use to automate the conversion of characters. For example, native2ascii - Native-to-ASCII Converter.
9. Zip your properties files into a single .zip file.
10. To import your resource bundle into your process application, open the localization resource file in Process Designer and click Import.
11. Browse to your updated .zip file to select it and click Finish.
    If you select to overwrite the values for all existing keys, then for any given language, key values in the imported files that do not match the existing key values will replace the existing values. Any new keys are added to the existing set of keys in the existing localization resource.

    If there are any missing keys in any of the translated files, warnings are displayed. Click each of the languages that are flagged with a warning to see which key translations are missing. If you do not supply translations for these keys, the default value is displayed in any interfaces that reference this key.