Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Deploying SharePoint 2010 Language Packs

If you want to have multilingual support in your SharePoint 2010 site, you will need to deploy the SharePoint 2010 Language Packs.

You can download the SharePoint 2010 Language Packs from here:

SharePoint Server Language Packs
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3411

SharePoint Foundation Language Packs
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=4731

One of the key points to note when downloading and installing the language packs is that the default language for downloading the language packs is English.  Therefore, if you simply download the language packs from the respective links, you will  not get the required functionality in your SharePoint site to support multiple languages.  Instead, when you download the individual language packs, you must actually select a different language for downloading the language pack prior to downloading.  For example, if you wish to download the language pack for Spanish, you would have to change the language on the download screen to Spanish.  Changing the language will actually change the resultant download Url such as this one for Spanish:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/es-es/details.aspx?familyid=046f16a9-4bce-4149-8679-223755560d54&displaylang=es

You will have to proceed with downloading each of the language packs for each of the languages you wish to support in the application.

Once you have downloaded all of the required languages, you will have to install the individual language packs on your SharePoint instance(s).  This process will also require you to re-run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard tool as part of the installation process. 

Once the installation process is complete, you will then have a new option under Site Settings called Language Settings which will allow you to configure the various installed languages for your SharePoint environment.  Configuring the Language Settings allows an end-user to change their Display Language to an alternative language such as French, German, Spanish etc.

If that is working, you have successfully deployed SharePoint Language Packs!  You can now begin to utilize multilingual variations of a SharePoint site.

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