Hi All,
On a recent project a customer had a requirement for publishing business objects reports in multiple languages. We asked around the business objects world and found, rather surprisingly, that there was no specific support to make generating business objects reports in multiple different languages easy to do.
What the customer wanted was for the headings, column names, help text etc. to be in any one of 5 languages based on the language defined for the user. However, the customer did not want to maintain 5 universes and 5 reports to be able to produce the same report in 5 languages.
We did some research and found that it is possible to maintain just one universe, one suite of reports and a single ‘translation table’ to translate the names of the fields on the reports between languages.
Naturally, there are some restrictions. It seems business objects was not designed with this requirement in mind. But we did manage to produce a workable result. The customer has recently agreed for me to publish the concepts my web site.
I hope the work we did is useful to someone else out there.
To download the documentation for managing multiple languages in business objects please click here -> www.peternolan.net/pr14.htm
If anyone else has some comments on how managing multiple languages in business objects and would like to share them please let me know here or on peter@peternolan.net. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has sovled this problem some other way.
Hi, Peter, thanks for sharing. Incidentally, there have been some topics discussed here on BOB along similar lines. It might be interesting to see how some of these other topics are similar to or different from your solution
[Edit - Interestingly enough, some of those topics include posts from someone named “Peter Nolan” on the Listserv ]
Hi Dave,
yep, that was me. I’ve not done a lot with BO for the last 8 months. But I am now back into using it again to build demos for Sybase IWS. Hence some of the other appends I am putting up.
Since I’ve built a web site I thought publishing the multi-language stuff might be useful too…
Hi Dave,
couldn’t find your email address on your profile…
Recently I built some code that can talk to ODBC sources veary easily (one of those ‘pieces of magic’ that we build when we have too much time on our hands!!) .
If there is enough interest in building multi-language universes the stuff that is published in the document I published can be generalised and upgraded to code. I guess I’ll just ‘put this append out there’ and see if many people want it. I’m still surprised there is no generalised solution for this. It’s a pretty obvious problem.
We were faced with the multilanguage problem beginning of this year as well, we looked at some localization tools like WizArt at that time but found that we had quite different requirements.
Our solution is similar to Peter’s one but has some significant differences I would like to share:
We have one ‘dictionary’ independent of the universes, I believe this forces users to provide good descriptions for a specific object (semantics).
The designer only has to create one universe in the language he prefers, when he has a release ready version, all descriptions (including where clauses to support for example TABLE.DSC_FR for a french description and TABLE_DSC_EN for an english one) are extracted from the universe and pushed to the dictionary, its then up to the business to provide a good translation for each of them. Once this is ready we have VB application that generates one universe for each required language.
The application does a simple string comparison to retrieve the corresponding translated items.
This tool is only used for what we call ‘business’ universes that are straightforward and usually run on top of datamarts and works for most elements of a document as well.
Hi Steven,
I have recently learned how to write vba for universes and written code to update BO universes from other XML models directly…over the christmas break I hope to write a generalised multi-language support tool that takes an XML file (which could be downloaded from a database) and apply the multiple languages in the XML file to the BO universe…
I’ll post a link here if I do get around to it…
I found that using the VBA interface and vb.net was a cleaner 9and supported) way of managing mass changes to universes…
Hi Dean,
I searched the web site and only found the snippet below…I could not find the bridge product itself…any clues?
Thanks
Leverage Existing Metadata and Data from Applications
Gain instant access to data stored in applications such as ERP systems via the universal metadata bridge. Designer automates the creation of metadata, making it much easier for you to maintain and export data to and from multiple applications.
Hi Rich,
are you still doing multiple languages in BO? If so, I have developed a ‘better way’. Because Sybase moved the tool IWS was modeled in I have had to write an generalised XML->BO Universe meta data transfer product.
I have installed 6.5.1 in english language and need to install in French and German languages. Do I need to unstall 6.5 and reinstall in the langusges I want or is there a file where I can go update the options for langusges.
At the recent XI World Tour, on-the-fly language switching was demoed. It wasn’t in depth, essentially a report had a title “Product Sales Data” and it was just a click and a select from a menu to change it into Japanese. But it may bode well for the future. I’ve not yet read the XI documentation to see how extensive this feature is.
Is the documentation for managing multiple languages in business objects still available somewhere? This link www.peternolan.net/pr14.htm doesn’t seem to work anymore.
I need to build English and French universes for a system (Using BO XI) . Want to avoid building duplicate universes and reports in the two languages. We have english and french text in the same tables. So, if I get this documentation, or any suggestions, it will be a great help.
Hi Peter,
I could not find the doc which expalains how to manage multiple languages in webi reports from the link provided by you.could you please send me the same to my personal id shanti_jena@yahoo.com. It will be of great help.
I couldnt find the document which explains how to manage multiple languages in BO. It seems that the link given has been expired. Could you please send me the document to bobjkb@gmail.com. Thanks in advance.
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(BOB member since 2002-06-06)
, this is a great help 
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(BOB member since 2002-10-04)
(BOB member since 2006-06-26)
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(BOB member since 2002-08-29)