Design considerations for localization

With careful attention to design, a Pega Platform™ application can support users who work in different languages from each other, or use languages or alphabets that sort text values (such as customer names) according to language-specific conventions, rather than American English conventions.

Pega Platform provides a Localization wizard that automates many of the steps necessary to create language-specific versions of your application. The Localization wizard identifies field values and text strings that are used in user interface rules. Text strings include labels, captions, Tool Tips, and instructions that appear in user-facing rules such as harness, section, list view, summary view, message, and portal rules.

To ensure the Localization wizard selects the necessary user interface rules, harness, section, and navigation rules are automatically configured to be selected for localization. Other design considerations include using field values for labels and confirmation notes, using paragraph rules for text, and customizing correspondence and work parties rules in a ruleset used for each language-specific localization.

You define Field Value rules for those rule types that use labels or other text strings under 64 characters. For example, a property reference in a section can use a field value as the label text. Applications translated into other languages have a field value with the translation for each UI form property.

Paragraph rules make content reusable. Instructions on a UI form, copyright declarations, and privacy notifications are all examples of reusable paragraph rules. Paragraphs longer than 64 characters can be kept intact as boilerplate content and easily applied multiple times in an application. For example, the instructions at the top of the form were translated into Spanish and can now be reused in several places in the application.

Rules such as correspondence, paragraph, and work party rules contain text that is translated manually and stored in the corresponding translation ruleset with the aid of the Localization wizard. Text that is used in paragraphs, correspondence, and correspondence fragment rules is packaged and output in a pair of HTML files called Base.html and Translation.html. Both files initially contain the same text. The translator puts the translated text into the Translation.html file.

Upload the compressed folder containing the translated paragraph and field values. Then change the locale and run the application to view the translated text.