If you’ve ever worked with multiple language packs for SharePoint, you’ll know that after you add a language pack to a farm, you’ll have the option of selecting a base language for any new site that is created.
The default language will be that of the site collection, but all installed language packs will be available. All of the system generated text in that site will be presented in the language of the site. This has been true since SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2010 introduced the MUI (Multilingual User Interface), which, if configured, allowed the user to switch the language of the system generated text. SharePoint 2013 retains the MUI, but the way it is used has changed. However, all versions of SharePoint share a common limitation.
Once a site is created, its language cannot be changed. No way, no how. Well, at least not in any supported way.
I recently encountered a situation where a customer wanted to move their Internet facing site to SharePoint 2013. It was a multilingual site that used variations. However, when it was originally set up, no language packs had been installed. Both variation sites (English and French) were based on English. Although the content in the French variation site was in French, all of the system text was in English. This obviously needed to be corrected as any system text would pop up in English. A significant investment had been made into the content, so re-creation wasn’t our first choice.
An attempt was made to use the export function (using stsadm –o export – I’m old school). While the content exported just fine, it couldn’t be imported into a newly created French site, because the source site was in English. A little bit of web searching found Mirjam’s Van Olst’s article from 2008 on how to change a site’s language. This article was written for SharePoint 2007, and described how the content database could be directly updated to change the language for one or many sites.
Unfortunately, as Mirjam correctly points out, monkeying with the content database voids your warranty, and leaves SharePoint in an unsupported state. She also points out that this approach doesn’t work well for publishing sites, which is what we were dealing with. Our goal was to wind up with a clean system, so this wasn’t going to work for us, at least not as a complete solution.
The beauty of this approach however is that if you’re willing to compromise your content database temporarily, you can literally change the language of the site. Using this approach, we were able to set the language to 1036 (French) for all sites, export the French variation, and then change it back. Now technically, we’ve edited the content database, and rendered it unsupported. However, this doesn’t matter, as we wanted to import the content into new (French) variation site in a new, untouched content database,
This approach works, and unless I’m mistaken, should be totally supported. To be clear the steps taken are:
- Back up the source content database (always a good idea)
- Open SQL Server Management Studio, Connect to the content database in question , and create a new query. Any of Mirjam’s update statements would work, but this one is easiest
UPDATE dbo.Webs SET Language = 1036
- Immediately export the site and all subsites. In my case I used stsadm, but of course PowerShell can be used, as can Central Administration.
stsadm-o export –url http://xxxx.xxxx.xxx/fr-ca –filename frenchsite
- Once complete, set the source site back to English
UPDATE dbo.Webs SET Language = 1033
- Create a new site collection in NEW content database. Create the destination site using French (or allow the variations system to create it)
- Import into the destination French site
stsadm -o import -url http://yyy.yyyy.yyy/fr-ca -filename frenchsite.cmp
The source content is successfully migrated into the destination site. Now, technically, because the source database has been directly modified, it’s in an unsupported state, and should be discarded. However, I have yet to see any ill effects. The good news is that the destination content database is pristine, and therefore this approach should be supported.
While we technically haven’t changed the language for an existing site, we have achieved the goal of getting the French language content into a proper French language SharePoint site.
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