Naoko Hamamoto's Weblog
Friday February 27, 2009
What's the Issue? Cannot Change the UI Language on my Windows XP?
I do a lot of testing under various configurations, and one of the testings that I had to perform today required Japanese Windows XP environment.
I decided to use my own Windows laptop, which has Windows XP in English installed.
I know that Windows allows you to change the language in which the UI components are displayed (and I have done it before at work), so I was looking for a way to do that. Looks like you can do it by changing the Language used in menus and dialogs option. This article explains the steps very well.
So I tried to do the same on my system, BUT there is no such option on my system. I logged out and logged back in, rebooted the system, etc. No luck. What the heck?
It turns out that this feature is only available on Windows XP Professional Edition. The version that I have is Windows XP Home Edition, so this feature is disabled. Oh boy, no wonder I could not get it to work at home, but it was working fine elsewhere. Just FYI, you can find out the version of your OS by running the winmsd command at the command-line prompt. You will see something like the following with a lot of information about your system.
Tuesday August 07, 2007
Localizing Jonathan's Blog
I have had a chance to be a part of the "Localizing Jonathan's Blog into Japanese" team recently. My good friend, who used to do this work, has left the company, and she has given me this volunteering opportunity. The way it works is quite simple. Once the English content becomes available, we send it off to the translation company. Once the localized content (in my case, it is Japanese) becomes available, a group of volunteers proofreads the content and makes any modifications if necessary. Then I post the content on the website. This is an exciting task for me, because
1. I am forced to read Jonathan's blog. Sometimes I get busy with my daily job and I don't get to his blogs. Now that I am responsible for localizing it, I am always up to his latest news and comments.
2. It teaches me how to translate. I am a Japanese native but I have been in the U.S. most of my life, so it's a great opportunity to learn how words get translated.
And last but definitely not the least,
3. I am making a difference! I was informed that Jonathan's blog is very popular among the Japanese community. It is very rewarding to feel that I am contributing to the community - something that Sun truly believes in.
Posted by naoko ( Aug 07 2007, 11:53:32 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Friday February 17, 2006
Changing system locale on the fly
I am new to globalization. Our organization (Globalization) is responsible for product localization and internationalization. Prior to joining this group, I was in development and backline support for various software product lines within Sun.
I have faced internationalization/localization issues throughout my career, but I did not really have a deep understanding of them. Now that I have joined this organization, I have to come to realize that there are a lot of cool stuff to learn! Some of these topics may be trivial to globalization gurus, but they may be of some interest to others. If you want to learn more about globalization, read on!
In globalization, we need to always switch back and forth between different locales, especially when we test products.
On Solaris, the common way is to relogin and select a different locale, assuming that the necessary font packages are already installed on the system. What about if you want to change the locale on a terminal window on the fly? You can use a command called locale to check the current setting.
Examples:
Using C (Posix) % locale LANG=C LC_CTYPE="C" LC_NUMERIC="C" LC_TIME="C" LC_COLLATE="C" LC_MONETARY="C" LC_MESSAGES="C" LC_ALL= Using ja (EUC) % locale LANG=ja LC_CTYPE="ja" LC_NUMERIC="ja" LC_TIME="ja" LC_COLLATE="ja" LC_MONETARY="ja" LC_MESSAGES="ja" LC_ALL=
You can change these environment variables to change the locale setting for that window.
On Windows, there is a command called chcp. When you type chcp, it tells you what the active console code page is. If you want to change it, simply add the code page for that locale.
Examples:
This is the active console code for U.S. English.
This is the active console code for Japanese.
I also learned from my colleague, Yuko, who is the Creator localization lead as well as my valuable resource on localization and Creator, that there are a couple of batch files on Japanese Windows. If you type us, it executes chcp 437 and if you type jp, it executes chcp 932. Pretty handy! Thanks Yuko!
Posted by naoko
( Feb 17 2006, 03:33:41 PM PST )
Permalink
Comments [3]
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