Please note that all new SharePoint related content is now hosted on the blog at www.muhimbi.com.

As we are providing our SharePoint solutions in multiple languages, we need to make sure that each and every translation is properly tested.

As it is not feasible, even with virtualisation, to have an instance of Central Administration for every available language, we need to be able to quickly switch the language used by Central Administration to test any of our custom translations (Feature descriptions, custom admin pages, etc.)

There is no official ‘Microsoft way’ to switch the CA language, but if you are running in a test environment then you may want to consider the following trick. Although we have not experienced any problems we don’t recommend switching CA languages in a production environment as any manual changes to your SharePoint databases will void any support contracts you may have with Microsoft.

Ok, enough talk, here is how to switch the language:

1. Look up the Locale ID for the language in this table. E.g. Japanese = 1041.
2. Use your favourite SQL Editor (e.g. SQL Server Management Studio) to open the ‘Webs’ table in the Content Database used by Central Administration.
3. You will most likely find only a single row in this table. If not then you will need to navigate to the correct row.
4. Update the ‘Language’ field to the correct locale, in our case 1041.

That is it. There is no need to do any ‘IISRESETs’, just refresh whatever CA page you are on and it will automatically switch languages.

A full list of languages for which Microsoft provides support in SharePoint can be found here.

Please note that all new SharePoint related content is now hosted on the blog at www.muhimbi.com.