You can configure your Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution so that users with different regional settings and text formats can access the same Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server and see user interface strings in their local language. This functionality supplements the use of language modules and helps resolve issues with conflicting text encoding.
The following procedure assumes that your solution contains strings in English and Dutch, and that you want to add support for Chinese. English and Dutch follow the same text encoding format, so you have been able to import the translation into Dutch to your Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution. But you cannot import strings in Chinese into the development environment because the text file cannot handle Chinese as well as Dutch and English. The same situation will occur if you want to add Chinese and Japanese to your solution.
To add translated strings for a conflicting text encoding format
In the development environment, export the strings for the objects that you want to translate. For more information, see How to: Add Translated Strings By Importing and Exporting Multilanguage Files.
The resulting text file contains user interface strings in English and Dutch.
Translate the strings in the resulting text file into Chinese by using your preferred translation process.
When translations are complete, save the translated strings into a text file in the UTF-8 text encoding format. For example, open the text file in Notepad, choose File, and then choose Save As. In the dialog that appears, in the Encoding field, choose UTF-8, and then choose Save.
Optionally, choose to replace the existing file, or save the file with a different file name. However, the extension of the file must be .txt.
Depending on your translation process, this file contains strings in Chinese, English, and Dutch. You save it in Unicode format so that Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server can access the content of the file.
Important We recommend that you remove the English and Dutch strings from the Unicode file before you copy it to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server computer. Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server queries the Translations folder for updated strings, and for performance reasons the folder should only contain strings that you cannot import into the development environment because of conflicting codepages. Copy the UTF-8 file to the equivalent of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\80\Service\Translations on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server computer.
When you have more than one service instance, there is a Translations folder for each service instance, such as C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\80\Service\Instances\MyInstance\Translations.
Restart the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server instance.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server adds the translated strings in the file to the metadata store for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment. Users of this Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server session can now change the user interface language from English to Dutch, and then to Chinese.
The metadata store is updated whenever you add new strings to the Translations folder and then restart the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server service instance. Cached strings are not deleted from the metadata store when you restart the service instance.