Yesterday I got a question via LinkedIn. I need to add Spanish translation to my W1 instance. How do I do that?
So, let me walk you through that process.
Here is my Business Central setup. It is the Icelandic Docker Container, so I have Icelandic and English. Switching between Icelandic and English works just fine.
Switching to Spanish gives me a mix of Spanish and English.
The Spanish translation for the platform is shipped with the DVD image and automatically installed. So are a lot of other languages.
Icelandic and English are built in captions in the C/AL code. And even if all these languages are shipped with the platform, these languages are not shipped with the application.
There is a way to get these application translations from the appropriate release and add them to your application.
Let’s start in VS Code where I have cloned my Business Central repository from GitHub. I opened the workspace file and also opened “setup.json” from the root folder of my repository.
This configuration points to the W1 Business Central OnPrem Docker Image. Now, let’s point to the Spanish one.
And let’s build a container.
Switching the Terminal part to AdvaniaGIT, I see that I am now pulling the Spanish Docker image down to my laptop.
This may take a few minutes…
After the container is ready I start FinSql.exe
Just opening the first table and properties for the first field I can verify than I have the Spanish captions installed.
So, let’s export these Spanish captions by selecting all objects except the new trigger codeunits (Business Central only) and selecting to export translation…
Save the export to a TXT file.
Opening this file in Visual Studio Code, we can see that the code page does not match the required UTF-8 format. Here we can also see that we have English in lines with A1033 and Spanish in lines with A1034.
We need to process this file with PowerShell. Executing that script can also take some time…
This script reads the file using the “Oem” code page. This code page is the one FinSql uses for import and export. We read through the file and every line that is identified as Spanish is the added to the output variable. We end by writing that output variable to the same file using the “utf8” code page.
Visual Studio Code should refresh the file automatically.
We need to create a “Translations” folder in the server folder. The default server uses the root Translations folder.
If you have instances then the “Translations” folder needs to be in the Instance.
Since I am running this in a container I may need to create this folder in the container.
Then, copy the updated file to the “Translations” folder.
And make sure it has been put into the correct path.
We need to restart the service instance.
Then in my Web Client I can verify that the Spanish application language is now available.
That is it!
Here is the PowerShell script
$LanguageFile = Get-Item -Path C:\AdvaniaGIT\Workspace\es.txt
Write-Host "Loading $($LanguageFile.Name)..."
$TranslateFile = Get-Content -Path $LanguageFile.FullName -Encoding Oem
$i = 0
$count = $TranslateFile.Length
$StartTime = Get-Date
foreach ($Line in $TranslateFile) {
$i++
$NowTime = Get-Date
$TimeSpan = New-TimeSpan $StartTime $NowTime
$percent = $i / $count
if ($percent -gt 1)
{
$percent = 1
}
$remtime = $TimeSpan.TotalSeconds / $percent * (1-$percent)
if (($i % 100) -eq 0)
{
Write-Progress -Status "Processing $i of $count" -Activity 'Updating Translation...' -PercentComplete ($percent*100) -SecondsRemaining $remtime
}
if ($Line -match "A1034") {
if ($TranslatedFile) {
$TranslatedFile += $Line + "`r`n"
} else {
$TranslatedFile = $Line + "`r`n"
}
}
}
Write-Host "Saving $($LanguageFile.Name)..."
Remove-Item -Path $LanguageFile.FullName -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Out-File -FilePath $LanguageFile.FullName -Encoding utf8 -InputObject $TranslatedFile -Force
In this post I used both AdvaniaGIT and NAVContainerHelper tools. Good luck.
