I have found out the answer to one question at least. The language of the static content depends on the locale preference set in the account of the logged on user. That sort of makes sense in the context of a monolingual administrator who wants to check that the page content is available in another language while still understanding the labels on the page, but IMHO it is going to cause grand confusion in any of the following scenarios:

• a user's browser preferences and account preferences do not coincide (perhaps because user doesn't know that they exist or how to set them)
• a logged-in user who speaks more than one language decides to switch languages to view the content in another language
• an anonymous user is using a browser with incorrect language preferences (say on a public computer) and cannot switch to correct language

I'd suggest that it should work like this:

• for anonymous users, the initial display language should be determined by browser language preference
• for logged on users, the initial display language should be determined by account locale preference, or if not available, by browser language preference
• the language selector should *always* be available
• static and dynamic content should always be displayed in the same language

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Paul Taylor

DotNetNuke, ASP.NET and SQL Server Development

Paul, the rule defined for static language is: same as content language a) for unauthenticated users OR b) in view mode. IMHO, editors should see field captions, help texts and button texts in their preferred language, even if pasting translations for a foreign language, e.g. an English editor for Chinese (w/o capable of that language).

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

Speed up your DNN Websites with TurboDNN

So there's the final piece of the puzzle: page mode is involved as well. I was testing in Edit mode for many scenarios, without realising that that also had an effect. Thanks for explaining. I take your point about editors w/o ability in a language.

That means there are four different factors affecting the language in which content is displayed. On top of that, static and dynamic content are not always displayed in the same language. Though finally I think it all makes sense, it has taken me a good few hours of experimentation and searching this forum to understand it. Is there a concise summary somewhere of how it is supposed to work?

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Paul Taylor

DotNetNuke, ASP.NET and SQL Server Development