Solved Windows and Ms Office Language

[Sarah.M]

Hi
If I have Windows English language and I build MS Access Database with any deference language and then does this will corrupt the database? Or MS Access will understand changes and keep database going smoothly?

I asked because I am going to make some language changes to Office and Windows

 

[The_Doc_Man]

To the best of my understanding, Access will operate in the chosen language normally, but any error messages issued by Windows will be in the language of Windows and those issued by Access will be in the language chosen for Access. Since a Windows-originated message is rare in a clean database, this should not be a problem.

I will make it clear that this is an opinion and if any of my colleagues have noted issues, I will defer to their expertise. But I've never seen problems with the environment you describe.

 

[sonic8]

If I have Windows English language and I build MS Access Database with any deference language and then does this will corrupt the database? Or MS Access will understand changes and keep database going smoothly?

I strongly recommend developing in English. From my experience, Access will "translate" from English to any other language without a problem. If you develop in a different language Access will recognize and translate localized expressions to ~99.5%, leaving a small margin of error which you need to fix manually.

 

[isladogs]

Whilst I completely agree with @sonic8, you should still find your applications work successfully if created in another language based on Latin script. That includes most European languages such as French, German, Spanish etc. Problems are much more likely if you develop in a non-Latin script language such as Japanese or Russian etc

However, in case it helps, I recently completed a Translate & Speak app - see YouTube video at Translate & Speak - YouTube and am currently in the final stages of development work on an Access add-in to translate all captions in forms & reports. You can also see a short video (no audio) of an early version of this app at Access Application Translator - YouTube.

If you subscribe to my channel, you will automatically be informed of any updates related to each of these apps

Whichever language you use for development, do bear in mind that:
a) captions will vary in length depending on the language used - leave sufficient space to handle this
b) make sure you manage issues with special characters. For example, apostrophes are widely used in languages such as French
c) the text used in message boxes & input boxes will NOT be automatically updated when you change language though the button text will be updated to match the Office language

 

[sonic8]

F

I strongly recommend developing in English. From my experience, Access will "translate" from English to any other language without a problem.

For clarification: I refer to the language used in expressions in queries, controls etc, not to the text displayed in the UI.
E.g. if you develop in German language Access, you'll see "Forms" being automatically translated to the German word "Formulare". If you open the very same database in English language Access, you'll see all (~0.5% failure rate) German terms automatically translated to English.
The small failure rate is why I recommend using English for development work.
If you nevertheless must use a localized version of Access for development work, it helps if you do explicitly type all keywords in English even though Access instantly translates them to the selected localized language. If Access itself auto-translated a term, it will also be able to auto-translate it to another language or back to English, bringing the 99.5% success rate I mentioned above to 100%.

All my experience is based on work with Latin character languages such as German, Swedish, and Dutch and older versions (97-2007) versions of Access.

 

[isladogs]

Thanks for the clarification Philipp. No disagreement there!