Resolving The Problem

We need to service the following languages on one IBM OS/400 system. US/Canadian English is the primary language. Other languages required are U.K. English, Canadian French, French for France and Switzerland, German for Germany and Switzerland, and Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. How can this be done? What combination of CODES and CCSID is required and where are they specified? Can a different keyboard type be used? Must various tables be specified in QDCXLATE?

At R520 and earlier, all the other languages must be installed on OS/400 as secondary languages. Because you have DBCS secondary languages being installed (Traditional and Simplified Chinese), English Uppercase and Lowercase Support for DBCS must be installed as the primary language. The feature code is 2984.

At R530 and later releases, it is no longer necessary that a primary DBCS language be installed to support a secondary DBCS language. Starting at V5R3, the primary installed language can be SBCS such as 2924 to support DBCS language such as 2962 - Japanese Kanji.

To use a certain language, change the system library list to add the secondary language library to the beginning of the library list.

For each language, it is recommended to have a separate subsystem, user profiles, job descriptions, and so on. Also, a different sign on screen for each language is recommended. This avoids confusion and keeps everything from intermixing with each other and avoids the possibility of data and system integrity problems.

In each job description and user profile, specify the Code Page (CCSID) of the language associated with this user profile. This means that when files are read by a user under a language, they will be converted from the CCSID of the file to the CCSID of the job. This ensures that we protect data integrity. Avoid using CCSID 65535 because this means that no conversion is done. If files must be shared by all languages, use the CCSID of the primary language. This is Code Page 37.

Also, ensure that you have a device and keyboard that supports the characters for each language. Every device is not able to support all languages. You might need a keyboard for each language because the layout of the keys for each language might be different. You should be able to use the 3196, 3197, 347x, and 348x devices and attach the appropriate keyboard to it. You must also change the keyboard type (KBDTYPE) on the device description to the keyboard type of the language being used.

For the DBCS languages Traditional and Simplified Chinese, you must have a separate device that supports these languages.