Adding new languages to EPiServer 5

We’ve recently run into problems with adding the less commonly-used language and locale combinations on an EPiServer installation. How do you add a new language to EPiServer 5 if it doesn’t appear in the list of available languages?

EPiServer takes the list of the languages that you can enable for a site from the languages that are installed on the host operating system. This can be a problem as the available languages can vary between different machines - for example, Indian English (en-IN) is shipped with Vista but not with Windows 2003 or XP. The big catch is that if you have a language enabled in your EPiServer database which is not installed on your target machine then EPiServer will throw an exception on start-up, which will pull your whole site down.

If you want to add a new language to EPiServer then you will have to install it on your operating system. This can be done via the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class in System.Globalization. This class allows you to create a new language from scratch or by copying it from an existing language, although you will have to run the code in the context of an Administrator account for it to work.

The code sample below shows how CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder can be used to create and register a new language based upon an existing language – in this case creating Hong Kong English (en-HK) from UK English (en-GB). Note that you’ll need a reference to sysglobl.dll in your project for this to compile.

public static void CreateCulture()
{
    //* Get the base culture and region information
    CultureInfo cultureInfo = new CultureInfo("en-GB");
    RegionInfo regionInfo = new RegionInfo(cultureInfo.Name);

    //* Create the a locale for en-HK
    CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("en-HK", CultureAndRegionModifiers.None);

    //* Load the base culture and region information
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(cultureInfo);
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(regionInfo);

    //* Set the culture name
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.CultureEnglishName = "English (Hong Kong)";
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.CultureNativeName = "English (Hong Kong)";

    //* Register with your operating system
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Register();

}

Once you’ve run this code, fire up EPiServer in Admin mode, select Manage Web Site languages from the Config tab, click on Add Language and your new locale will be ready to use.