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Steve_McCrea
Level 4

Chinese Localization

Our customer claims that our installer runs in English on her machine. We have the installer localized for Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional. In another thread with a similar problem MichaelU suggests commenting out the 'RequireExactLangMatch' key in setup.ini (in relation to a Hong Kong localisation issue) but does not explain what the consequences might be. Will commenting out that line solve this issue if the desired language is Chinese but not in Taiwan or China (HK, Singapore and Macau) and still be OK for Taiwan and China?
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MichaelU
Level 12 Flexeran
Level 12 Flexeran

Typically our LCID matching pays attention only to the "base" language. For example 0409 (en-US), 0809 (en-UK), 0c09 (en-AU), etc. all share the 09 and the code page 1252, and for the purposes of an installation are generally a pretty good substitute for each other.

However Chinese is a special case. The LCIDs 0404 (zh-TW, CP=950) and 0804 (zh-CH, CP=936) have significant differences (to the extent that they use different code pages, ANSI strings are not compatible), so showing one of those on a computer configured to the other is probably not a good substitute. Unfortunately the approach you reference also affects the other LCIDs with the same "base" including 0c04 (zh-HK, CP=950), 1004 (zh-SG, CP=936).

The ANSI string incompatibility matters less these days with UTF8 and other Unicode support. However I believe there are also geopolitical problems with showing the "wrong" language. I'm not familiar enough with how zh-HK and zh-SG compare, but based on the code page differences, I would guess that adding zh-HK and zh-SG (and possibly zh-MO/1404/CP=950) with copies of the equivalent translation (by matching code page) would be a good approach if you can't justify (and/or afford) further localizations. If you add these languages to your project, it might be better to actually extend the RequireExactLangMatch key to similarly describe these languages.
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Steve_McCrea
Level 4

Thanks for that explanation Michael. Unfortunately InstallShield (2011) does not have a better solution than the user manually adding a new language. It should be a common enough scenario that InstallShield could add some kind of built-in support for those localizations.
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