How to Localize WebHelp Output

Static labels used in the WebHelp output are kept in translation files in the DITA-OT/xsl/common folder. This folder is found either in the Oxygen XML Author plugin installation folder, or elsewhere if you are using a different DITA-OT distribution. Translation files have the strings-lang1-lang2.xml name format, where lang1 and lang2 are ISO language codes. For example, the US English text is kept in the strings-en-us.xml file.

Follow these steps to localize the interface of the WebHelp output (for simplicity sake, let us suppose you want to localize the WebHelp interface into Canadian French.):

  1. Look for the strings-fr-ca.xml file. If it does not exist, create one starting from strings-en-us.xml.
  2. Translate the labels with the following names: Content, Search, Keywords, Search no results, Output generated by, Next topic, Previous topic, and Parent topic. Labels are stored in XML elements that have the following format: <str name="Label name">Caption</str>.
  3. Edit the DITA Map WebHelp transformation scenario and set the args.default.language parameter to the code of the language you want to localize the interface into (in our case, it is fr-ca).
  4. Run the transformation scenario to produce the WebHelp output.