Useful Tips

Regarding Translations and the Dictionary

The Oceanik multilingual module basically recovers the values found between HTML tags, meaning the text between « > » and « < » and other types of values such as « TEXT », « ALT » and « TITLE » fields.

These values are considered as a single block of information to be translated. The multilingual module verifies the integral presence of this value in the language dictionaries. When a correspondence is found in the dictionary, Oceanik replaces the value found in the page by its correspondence in the same language as the one currently displayed onscreen. Let’s take two examples :

Case n°1

Let’s say that :

The HTML source code of the source page (in English for this example) has the following tags Team site.
The dictionary has an element that corresponds to « Team site » in the EN column (for English) and the French equivalent « Site d’équipe » in the FR column.

Alors :

The value between the Team site will be replaced by Site d’équipe in the corresponding French page.

Case n°2

Let’s say that :

The HTML source code of the source page (in English for this example) has the following tags Team site.
In this case, the dictionary does not have an element that corresponds to « Team site » in the EN column.
However, the dictionary has an element that corresponds to « Team » in the EN column and a French equivalent corresponding to « Équipe » in the FR column.

Then :

Team site will not be replaced on the French page.

A solution for Case n°2 could be :

- Use the character set « *** ».

Create the element with the following values in your dictionary.

« Team *** » in the EN column
« *** d’équipe » in the FR column

We will then see the following results :

Team site will be replace by site d’équipe in the French page.

Explanation :

The three stars placed in an element of the dictionary are interpreted as variable values in the information block, while « Team » corresponds to unchanging values.

Note that the use of these three characters « *** » is rarely required in the day to day use of the solution. In the previous example, the best practice would be to directly create the « Team site » information block in the dictionary (see Case n°1).

Content Creation

We strongly recommend that you create multilingual content rather than directly adding content to the dictionary. Where practicable, we encourage the creation of a web part or of one page per language.

In the case of a multilingual web part :

Create one web part per language;
Apply the « Display in ‘langue1’ » functionality for the language1 web part ; and
Apply the « Display in ‘langue2’ » for the language2 web part.

Only the proper web part will be displayed for the currently used language.

Advantage: the content of the web part is not added to the dictionary.

For multilingual items in lists/web parts :

Activate Oceanik on the web part or list ;
To create a multilingual item, associate a language to it. Repeat this operation for each language ;

Only the proper item will be displayed in the currently used language.

Advantage: the content is not entered in the dictionary.

In the case of « content fields » or static content :

Use the « SPS_STATIC_LNG_XX » tag associated to an HTML table, where the XX variables correspond to the language code.
Information on how to use this functionality can be found in section 3.8 of the User’s Guide.
The advantages are the same as the ones listed above.

In the case of XSLT views :

Activate Oceanik on the list.
Use the « » column to filter your view by language. This column is created automatically once the functionality has been activated.