To ensure that users see reports, data, or metadata in their preferred language, or in a language specific to their region, add and remove partial locales (language) or complete locales (language-region) in the Content Locales table.
Adding incomplete locales (languages) to the Cognos 8 environment does not guarantee that your computer has a font that can show Web pages in your preferred languages. Ensure that you install the appropriate language packs to support the character sets you use. For more information, see Adding Fonts to the Cognos 8 Environment.
Content locale consists of the language and region combinations that are supported for the following:
Content Manager objects
Framework Manager objects
Content Manager data formatting
report data formatting
report text (titles)
database data, if the database tool is configured to use locale
Content locale does not apply to PowerCubes, whether they are created in Cognos 8 Transformer or Cognos Series 7 Transformer. Each PowerCube is created with a single language encoding. For multiple languages, a separate PowerCube is required for each language.
If you have a multilingual model, you can specify the content locale of query data.
Users can create reports and access data using one of the supported languages, which include: English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Greek, Turkish, Norwegian, Danish, and Russian.
The architecture is capable of supporting locales as well as additional languages. Therefore, it is possible to show data in two versions of English, each using a locale, such as en-us (English, United States) and en-ca (English, Canada).
User preferences allow the user to specify a locale or use the Web browser locale for both the product and content locale.
Some content is language-specific, such as names, and is called a partial locale. Some content is specific to language and region, such as date formats, and is called a complete locale. Use the Content Locale Mappings table to do the following:
Ensure that users can access content that is language sensitive, but not locale sensitive.
For example, map a complete locale, such as en-us (English, United States), to a partial locale, en, to ensure that users can access content in English that is not subject to regional variation. For example, names and descriptions are usually specified by language, not locale.
Ensure that users can access content that is locale sensitive.
For example, map a partial locale, such as en, to a complete locale, en-us, to ensure that users can access content that is locale sensitive, such as data format of dates and numbers. Data formatting is set by the combination of language and region and so requires a complete locale.
Map a user-preferred language to another language.
For example, a report is not available in the preferred language, Vietnamese, but is available in French and German. You can use the Content Locale Mappings table to map Vietnamese to French or German. You then see the report in the mapped language.
Map unsupported content locales to supported locales.
When you map partial locales, Cognos 8 does the mapping after checking for a user locale. If all users are using the same Web browser types, mappings behave the same way for all users. However, if you have multiple browsers, results vary.
For example, on Internet Explorer, locale identifiers for many European regions do not exist. In other words, the user locale of fr-fr (French, France) cannot be selected. Only the fr (French language identifier) is available. To correct the problem, fr can be mapped to fr-fr, so that the language-region value is returned. Netscape provides region identifiers, so locale mapping is not required to return a value of fr-fr. This distinction may produce inconsistent results for different browser users. On Internet Explorer, where fr is mapped to fr-fr, users receive content that is region specific (fr-fr). On Netscape, where fr does not return a value of fr-fr, users receive content that is not region specific.
In a Framework Manager model, users can specify the column titles and column descriptions that they want to see in their own language. A report automatically switches to the user preferred language. No action is required by the author.
In Report Studio, users can specify a language or locale for
report data items, such as calculations, that do not exist in the metadata model
text in a report, such as the page title
report layouts