Determine languages

When describing the language concept in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS), the following language setting types are mentioned:

• System language – Used to control date/time formatting, sort order,and so on.
• User interface language – Controls the localized (translated) resources to display, and determines the language of the user interface.
• Content language – The preferred language when displaying content.

See Globalization for information about the language management concept in CMS.

Determine system language

You can determine the current value by reading CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and set by setting Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture. The information is a CultureInfo object and you can retrieve the language code (en-GB, sv-SE, and so on) from CultureInfo.Name.

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Note

CurrentCulture cannot be a neutral culture because its primary purpose is to provide sorting and formatting information. This means that the langauge code must be something like en-GB or sv-SE. Trying to use a neutral culture results in an exception when assigning the culture to CurrentCulture.

The following rules determine the system language:

• If not in edit or admin user interface, use the content language.
• If a user is logged in and sets a preferred language, use the personalized language selection for this user.
• Use the setting from GlobalizationSettingsOptions.CultureLanguageCode. If culture is set to Auto, the language preferences from the web browser are used.

Determine user interface language

You can determine the current value by reading CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture and set  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture. The information is a CultureInfo object, and you can retrieve the language code (en, sv, and so on) from CultureInfo.Name.

CurrentUICulture can be a neutral culture (which means CultureInfo.GetCulture("en") would return a valid culture for CurrentUICulture) because CurrentUICulture is never used for sorting or formatting.

The following rules determine the user interface language:

• If not in edit or admin user interface, use the content language.
• If a user is logged in and sets a preferred language, use the personalized language selection for this user.
• Use the setting from GlobalizationSettingsOptions.UICultureLanguageCode. If culture is set to Auto, the language preferences from the web browser are used.

Determine content language

You can determine the current value by reading IContentLanguageAccessor.Language or through static accessor ContentLanguage.PreferredCulture. You can change the value by assigning this property. Content language can be a neutral culture. If a specific culture is required (for example, for sorting or formatting), then method CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture can be used on-demand and follows the .NET rules for determining a specific culture from a neutral culture. See CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture.

The preferred content language is determined by the following rules:

• That language is used if you have defined the hostname to be associated with a specific language. The setting is specified under Manage Sites in the admin view.
• If there is a language segment in the URL (like http://company.com/en/info), that language is used (en).
• If you are in the edit view and have selected a specific language site from the Sites section, that language is used.
• If the requests contain a query parameter or cookie named epslanguage, use the language defined by the query or cookie.
• If the setting GlobalizationSettingsOptions.UseBrowserLanguagePreferences is true, then the language preference from the web browser is used.
• Use the language mapped to wildcard host '*' if specified.
• Fetch the setting from the GlobalizationSettingsOptions.UICultureLanguageCode.
• If nothing else is discovered, use the first enabled language branch defined in Admin / Language Branches, meaning it can be viewed as the default language.

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Note

After you determine the preferred content language, there is another step that uses the preferred content language to determine the actual language to display. If the current content does not exist for the preferred content language, a language fallback process is started. For pages, this is defined by the page language settings in the edit view. See Globalization scenarios for information about language-specific content settings in CMS.

Strict language routing

Strict language routing causes the display of an error message if the URL and language-host mapping do not match. The following examples show how the language routing works. Say, for example, that on a website, there is a page under root named News in English and Nyheter in Swedish. Given that no language mapping is defined for site hosts in the configuration file, the URLs are handled as follows:

• http://localhost/News/ (404 because when not having language-host mapping in config language segment must be present)
• http://localhost/en/News/ (page in English)
• http://localhost/sv/Nyheter/ (page in Swedish)
• http://localhost/Nyheter/ (404 as in point 1)
• http://localhost/en/Nyheter/ (404 because the language for a page with the URL segment does not match the language segment)

When a language-to-host mapping is defined, then a URL like http://localhost/en/News/ produces a 404, because when there is a host mapping that defines a language, the language should not be present in the URL.

You can modify the strict language routing behavior by setting RoutingOptions.StrictLanguageRouting, that you can set to false to get a more "tolerant" behavior.