To watch the full version in just one file, click here -> Localization-Globalization in ASP.NET
Hello everyone, this is my first video tutorial and if I do everything right I hope is not going to be the last, but for this I beg you that after watching this movie, please give me a feedback, you can write anything, that you didn’t like, it was terrible, or maybe that you liked, so before we can start, let me introduce myself, my name is Luciano Sampaio, I’m from Brazil, I’m the Lead Developer of Apollo Media and in charge now to bring not only to my co-workers, but also to you or anyone that is interest to, some video tutorials about the most common tasks you’ll probably find on your days job, I believe I’ll be making at least 3 of these tutorials every week.
Part 1
Part 2
For the very first tutorial, I’ll talk about something very basic but that has a big importance for the company I work for, which is how can we make multilingual websites for our clients without the need to spend too much time, but always with high quality patterns on our minds, and now you can ask “why should I bother creating a website for more than one language”. Well first you have to think, who is your website’s target? Is it only your city? Your country? Or the whole world? Because like Canada which I assume everybody knows is an official Bi-lingual country, so people can either speak English or French. That’s why I decided to create this tutorial which is supposed to show you some of the options you might have to accomplish this task, but it does not mean is always the only or better way to do it. So like my friend Darius likes to say “Knowledge is power”, use it at your own risk.
Microsoft has created on the .NET Framework 2.0 two wonderful features, which are called “Localization” and “Globalization”; they exist on Web and Windows applications with the same concept with only a few differences related to the steps on how to add to your applications. This tutorial will only cover how to work with them on Web applications. We are not going to do anything fence, but if you just like me are a visual person, in other words, you rather see than read, I’m going to show you exactly what are the steps you have to do to make your website support more than one language.
To download the code, click here -> Localization-Globalization in ASP.NET
Author: Luciano Sampaio
January 16th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I did in fact state that “knowledge is power” But I would like to correct my statement Luciano.
Knowledge is almost power…But before it transforms into power it needs to be applied!
So the new statement is “knowledge when applied is POWER”
By the way I thought you did a terrific job in your first video tutorial. People take it to granted just how difficult making a video tutorial can be.
You my friend did a great job and I am very proud of you.
February 13th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Hi Luciano Sampaio,
The video is useful to me,but i don’t know what “hello” is called in brazil then how to change the text .Can you tell me how to globaliz in different languages u don’t even know .Is that possible?
February 13th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Hi Radhika, thanks for you comment.
Localize and globalize using .NET is REALLY easy, but unfortunately it does not automatically translate for you. You have to know the other language, there is no way the framework will know that “Hello” in English means “Olá” in Portuguese(Brazilian Language). I believe that if you’re are creating a website for users let’s say in CHINA, you probably know someone that speaks Chinese and who can help you translate your website. thanks again!
March 21st, 2008 at 10:58 am
Muito legal, véio. vc tah foda tanto na linguagem quanto no inglês. mandando bem mesmo. só vi esse primeiro veio por enquanto, mas vou dar uma olhada nos outros, e nos q ainda estão por vir. Queria saber 2 coisas, primeiro, q programa vc tah usando pra fazer esses videos? e segundo, c comprou algum livro pra tirar a certificação .net ou arranjou na internet? to estudando pra tirar a certificação java e depois to querendo aproveitar e tirar a .net tb. abraço véio. continue nesse ritmo.
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Hi! There, the video is great. I have some doubts to convert the languages. Let say if we are developing web site with multi-languages. The whole page has to correspond to the user prefer select language. It would be great if you can point out some hints to go about it. Do I have to store everything data in different languages in database? How about the global resource file? Do I have to create different page to store different language that it point to?
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Hello Praneth, Thanks for your comment. Well first let me answer your questions. 1 question: If you’re thinking to localize the whole website, I would suggest to store the Static texts in the localization or globalization files and the dynamic texts in a database, because you have to remember that the localization and globalization are just normal XML files, so you could have problems if your website gets a lot of traffic. 2 question: You don’t have to create different pages, you just need to create different localized files for the static texts and the Framework will bind them to each element for you. But for the dynamic texts you will have to write your own code. I hope I answered your questions, let me know if you need anything else! thanks!
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Thanks Luciano, It helped me a lot… I have 2 questions
1- What if someone coming from Portugal (or any other Portugueese country) visited the site. Does the BR in pt-BR would come in conflict with the pt-Portugal?
2- What about a second page… How doe ASP.NET knows which language to display… Can you show me? I have looked everywhere and can’t seem to find the solution. My project displays the right language on one page (if chosen in that particular page) but went clicking the submit button, The other page only displays the English version.
Thanks and keep up the good work
July 15th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hello again,
1- Answer: The framework will always try to match the language of the user, if the website doesn’t support that language, it will try to match the closest one, so if the user is coming from Portugal and the only Portuguese language that your website supports is pt-BR so that will be the language displayed to the user.
2-Answer: Unfortunately the framework by itself doesn’t know which language the user wants in all the pages, this is up to you, what you can do is if the user chooses a language, you can set a cookie or a session so on the other pages you will be able to know which language to show.
Let me know if you need more help!!!
August 8th, 2008 at 2:55 am
It was very helpful !!
thansk much!
October 13th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Luciano,
Estava navegando no youtube e me deparei com um dos seus tutorial para localization.
Eu vivo nos EUA e estava trabalhando em comunicação. O interessante é que com este mercado tão internacional eu estava a cargo direto dos serviços de tradução.
Achei o seu trabalho muito interessante e se precisar de input, estou às ordens.
um abraço,
Rebecca
October 13th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Oi, Rebeca!! Fico feliz que gostou do tutorial, O assunto “localization” é particularmente um dos meus favoritos, ainda mais que sou brasileiro, morando em um país que se fala Inglês e Frances e trabalhando em uma empresa que produz aplicações com o idioma que o cliente quiser!
Obrigado!
December 12th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Hi Luciano Sampaio,
The tutorial was very useful and too good. All this works fine, but what if we will browse it from a virtual directory? It says the resource not found etc….
December 12th, 2008 at 6:41 am
hi again, i repeated the task as shown, but when i change the language preference in the internet options the hyperlink text does not change, it is showing some junk characters.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Hi,
Thanks for your post.
I have performance and code maintenance related question.
I tried google for this reason but no luck.
We have big application about 1000 pages in asp. We are in discussion to convert to ASP.NET. There are 25 languages to which we give support. If we maintain 25 RESX files for each ASPX page, there will be 1000*25=25000 RESX files, then is OK?
Is there any way to avoid this. Dynamic data is different. There is static text like titles, error messages, heading etc.
Will it cost performance?
Thank you,
Hemant
January 13th, 2009 at 12:58 am
Dear Luciano Sampaio,
The article is really good. Helped me to visualize multiple language integration in my site. Thanks!!!!
Regards,
Anand Kumar
April 28th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Bravo Luciano! Very clear and concise. Thank you/Grazie.