Trace and resolve problems while translating Microsoft CRM 4.0

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the first version of Dynamics CRM that enables multiple languages. This is a great advantage and possibility to serve Microsoft CRM to a broad market.

A Installation of Microsoft CRM is always based on one language. This is the language you used while installation. To enable additional languages you have to install and activate language packs. You can get them at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=50761e58-6040-4cf3-853a-f5ab535f7194 

Some problems occured while our first multi-langual installation. Here i want to explain how we traced that our translations are working and how we fixed problems with missing translations.

When you are translating your costumization in Mircrosoft CRM you will do this by exporting a translation file and reimport after you translated it. You can export the file under “Settings > Customizations > Export Labels for translation”.

Then you can open this XML file with Excel and start translating. After you have finished the translation you can reimport it under “Setting > Customizations > Import Labels for Translation”.

Important: After import don’t forget to publish all entities. Otherwise no translation would be active.

In our installation we mentioned that some translations were dropped and didn’t made it into CRM. After switching to german after translation some the label of a section still showed up in english. To check this we had a simple idea. All translations are included in an entity export. So we exported the entity were the translation was missing and opened the customizations.xml file in Visual Studio 2005 (any other text editor would make it). There we searched for the untranslated term and found a section like this.

<labels>
  <label description="Language" languagecode="1033" />

</labels>

In this section only one translation for the sectionis available. The languagecode defines for which language the text stands. 1033 is the code of english. 

Now we had discovered that this translation didn’t made it into the databse. We are trying to find out why this happened but we have no explanaition yet but we found a way to add the translation.

We just added a new label node with the right languagecode and text attribute and reimported the customization.xml. The labels section looked like this.

<labels>
  <label description=”Language” languagecode=”1033″ />
  <label description=”Sprache” languagecode=”1031″ />
</labels>