Language selection priority

This figure shows LMS priority when selecting languages and should help you understand the relationship of the various settings for Site, Course, and User.

User preference

A user can set their preferred language via Preferences in the user menu (top right).

This list will show all installed language packs unless the site administrator has limited these in Settings> Site administration > Languages > Language settings > Languages on language menu in which case it will show only that list.

Course administration settings

A manager or instructor can force the language of their course in Course settings > Edit settings > Appearance > Force language.

This list will show all installed language packs unless the site administrator has limited these in Settings > Site administration > Languages > Language settings > Languages on language menu in which case it will show only that list.

The capability lms/site:forcelanguage may be allowed by the admin for users who need to override this language (for example, when testing problems in a course in a language they do not know.)

Site administration settings

Default language settings for a site are in Settings > Site administration > Language > Language settings.

Note that some settings on this page will only operate on the language packs already installed in the site, so you may need to install languages packs first.

Language autodetect

By default, LMS detects a user’s language from their browser setting. However, language auto-detection may be disabled so that the default site language is used instead.

Default language

This sets the default language for the site. All newly created user accounts will inherit this language as their default, unless you explicitly assign a user another one during account creation.

Changing this default does not change the default language of already existing users. See the FAQ ‘When I change to a new default language, users still have the old language.’ in Language FAQ for suggestions of what to do about it.

This setting can be overridden by the user’s preferred language or by using the language menu.

If a preferred language is set in your browser then this will override the default site language (unless language auto-detection is disabled).

You can enable localised error messages for database connection problems by add the following line to your config.php file:

$CFG->lang="yourlangcode";

Display language menu

This sets whether the language menu is displayed at the top of each page. If this is turned off, the only place where a user can change the language setting is via user menu > Preferences > User Account > Preferred language 

Note: the location or even the presence or absence of this language menu is theme dependent. In the default theme, it appears in the top bar on the upper left of the screen, to the right of any theme custom menu items. In older themes, it may only display on the login page and the front page.

Languages in the language menu

If you want to limit the number of languages users and instructors can select from, enter a reduced list here. This should be in the form of the language codes separated by commas, for instance, en_us,es_mx,fr,fr_ca.

This list controls the possible options that will be available both on the Course level with the Force language setting and in User Profiles with the Preferred language setting.

If your site uses a child language that relies in a parent language, you can edit ‘Languages on language menu’ in Settings > Site Administration > Language > Language settings, and remove the parent language; eg, if you are in Canada and you want your users to use Canadian French but not the original French language.

Cache language menu

The cache is automatically refreshed when you install or delete a language pack via the in-built language packs management tool. If you install a new language pack manually, you have to use Purge all caches feature to refresh the cached list.

Cache all language strings

Caches all the language strings into compiled files in the data directory.

If you are translating LMS or changing strings in the LMS source code then you may want to switch this off. Otherwise always leave this enabled for normal, production sites. Turning it off will force the server to go to disk to read all the language strings for each user session, which will impact performance.

Sitewide locale

Choose a sitewide locale – this will override the format and language of dates for all language packs (though names of days in calendar are not affected). You need to have this locale data installed on your operating system (eg for linux en_US.UTF-8 or es_ES.UTF-8).

In most cases this field should be left blank unless you are sure what you are doing, as LMS will use the locale of the server.

Excel encoding

Leave as default (Unicode) unless you have a particular reason for wanting Latin encoding.

Some files, like LMS import and export files and custom language packs or language files from third-party modules, need to be converted or treated as UTF-8 before they may be used with LMS.

*nix like computers (including Mac OS X)

Generally, this may be done with the iconv command on Unix, Linux or a Mac.

iconv -f original_charset -t utf-8 originalfile > newfile

see also the windows explanation – the script there is one for *nix computers but used in a cygwin environment

Windows computers

For Windows, there are four methods of performing the conversion.

Method 1

• Open the flat file in PSPad (a freeware editor): http://www.pspad.com (some other editors people use: TextPad or NotePad++ or Crimson Editor, but there are many others. Windows built-in editors Notepad and Wordpad are often giving problems)
• Click on Format, UTF-8
• Save the file

Method 2

Download the Windows version of the iconv program. Download the “Complete package, except source” and run the setup program. The executable is located in the bin folder. Run from the command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and follow the instructions as above.

Method 3

The conversion may also be done by using Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, and executing the iconv command in that environment. Here is an example of a working solution on Windows with Cygwin:

• Create a text file, named ToUtf8.txt
• Fill it with the following code

#!/bin/bash
FROM=iso-8859-1
TO=UTF-8
ICONV="iconv -f $FROM -t $TO"
# Convert
find ToUTF/ -type f -name "*" | while read fn; do
cp ${fn} ${fn}.bak
$ICONV < ${fn}.bak > ${fn}
rm ${fn}.bak
done

Two things should be changed for your local situation:

1. FROM is the originating encoding (the one your original files are in)
2. ToUTF is the foldername where the files that need to be converted are in. This folder may contain subfolders. Make sure you have a backup!

• Start Cygwin.
• With the cd foldername, cd.., ls commands, go to the folder on your windows machine where the ToUtf8.txt script and the ToUTF8 folder are in.
• Execute the script by typing sh ToUtf8.txt and your files will be converted.

Method 4

The default Unicode format for Microsoft Excel and Wordpad is UTF-16.
These files can be converted to UTF-8 using GNU Emacs 22.1

• Open the file with Emacs
• Enter the command

  C-x RET c utf-8 RET

• You will then be asked what command you want this encoding to apply to
• Enter the command

  C-x C-w

  then enter a new file name

• The file you have saved will be UTF-8

Saving files directly as UTF-8

Most text editors these days can handle UTF-8, although you might have to tell them explicitly to do this when loading and saving files. (The notable exception to this is probably Notepad on Windows.)

Windows

You may save a file using Notepad (sometimes called “Editor”) as UTF-8 but not with Wordpad.

1. Open Notepad
2. File – Save as -> there you see 3 fields set the last one called “encoding” to UTF-8

Mac OS X

The built-in text edit application has a ‘Plain text encoding’ option in the Save as… dialogue.

Linux

The standard Gnome Text Editor defaults to UTF-8 and has character set options when loading and saving.