Globalization Terms and Concepts

Globalization Terms

Culture
Culture is used to assign a language and locale pair to Users. For example, the culture "en-US" assigns the English language and the U.S. locale to Users. Cultures can be set globally and assigned to Roles and to individual Users.
- Base Cultures
  Refers to the strings provided for these languages and cultures:
  - English (United States) (en-US)
  - German (Germany) (de-DE)
  - French (France) (fr-FR)
  - Portuguese (Brazil) (pt-BR)
  - Spanish (Spain) (es-ES)
- Primary Culture
  The primary culture, also referred to as the installed culture, is the culture used by the majority of a CSM system. In most cases, the culture is based on the culture selected when you upgrade CSM from a version earlier than 9.2.0.
- Preferred Culture
  Refers to the first preferred fallback culture that is shown to Users when a translation is unavailable in their selected culture. The preferred culture is always the first enabled culture listed on the Manage Cultures page of the Globalization Management window.
- Source Culture
  Refers to the culture that is a starting point for a Language Pack. The source culture provides a set of strings for a particular culture that you can translate.
- Target Culture
  Refers to the culture for which you will translate strings. For example, your source culture might be English and your target culture might be Danish (Denmark). In this case, you will translate English strings to Danish.
Definition
A definition is a system entity that makes up a CSM content object, such as a Business Object, form, grid, relationship, or saved search.

Each definition contains a set of strings that can be modified. These strings may be used in one or many definitions.
Language Pack
A Language Pack is a set of strings that enable support for specific languages and locales. Each Language Pack has a set of strings in a source language; these strings are translated to a target language.
Language Pack Bundle
A Language Pack Bundle is a set of Language Packs based on existing languages in your system when you create a Language Pack.

String Types

Each CSM system includes the following types of strings that can be translated.

String Type	Description
Content	Strings for Business Objects, forms, dashboards, expressions, One-Step Actions, etc. This includes OOTB content and customer-created content.
Lookup Table Data	Strings for Fields values for Lookup Tables can be translated after you enable localization for each table and Fields within those tables.
Portal Content	Portal-based strings for User-defined header and footer, menus, toolbars, and more.
Platform	Typically client-based strings, such as those for menu items, toolbars, dialogs, form controls, and tooltips. You cannot change the Platform strings for the languages provided by CSM. You can, however, use one of the five base CSM languages as the starting point for a Language Pack that includes platform strings.
Portal Platform	Portal-based resource strings for toolbars, menus, errors, and more.

To translate various string types, select the scope when you create a Language Pack.

Fallback Mechanism

The order of cultures on the Manage Cultures page determines which language is shown to Users if there is not a translation available for the culture they are using.

Note: The fallback mechanism applies to all strings, except those in Lookup Tables.

The first culture in the list is known as the "preferred" culture. This is the culture that pertains to most Users in your system. Below that, the order of enabled languages determines what is shown to Users if a translation is not available for their culture.

In the example below, Users with the Spanish (Peru) culture set will see strings in Spanish. If a string is not available for that language, it will be shown in English, and then French if an English version is not available.

Globalization fall-back mechansim