These languages use ASCII and ISO-8859-1 character sets.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit code where each character represents a unique character. The ASCII character set allows all regular American and British English characters to be represented and comprises 128 characters that are categorised as follows:

The 8th bit provides for an additional 128 characters which are known as the extended ASCII characters. There are different versions of the 8-bit ASCII table, however one of the most common is described according to ISO 8559-1 (also called ISO Latin-1).

Windows-1252 is the common encoding for these characters and languages supported by Windows-1252 include:

When using ISO 8559-1 (ISO Latin-1), the extended ASCII character set (codes 128-255) includes the following characters:

The ASCII character set describes 128 characters and is consistent across all character sets. However by use of alternate sets of extended ASCII characters (codes 128-255) a number of other languages can be supported.

This means that the regular English characters (letters, numbers, punctuation etc.) together with the alternate languages specific characters are described in a single character set.

Examples include:

Certain languages are intrinsically different than those with Latin-based characters (single-byte languages), as they each far exceed the 256 character limit (128 ASCII characters and 128 additional language specific characters) that can be stored in a single 8-bit byte.

A common technique is then to use multiple bytes (either a fixed or variable length) to encode each character.

Examples include:

You can enable a multi-byte language in SYSPRO provided you configure your regional settings and database collation appropriately, before activating the language inside SYSPRO.

In addition, if you define the appropriate XML encoding, you can produce SRS reports containing both English and other language characters, and third party applications will be able to interact with the business objects sending and receiving those characters.

The plain text dictionaries supplied by SYSPRO consist of words and phrases that have been translated into the following supported languages:

The SYSPRO development team is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of these supported languages, however a SYSPRO office, partner or client can research, implement and support any additional languages if required.

However it is important to note that any additional languages are the complete responsibility of the territory office, partner or client who develops and maintains that language dictionary. The SYSPRO development team can provide assistance and advice, but the sole responsibility for the implementation in the foreign language is that of the territory office or client.

If you are considering researching or implementing any other language outside of the languages supported by SYSPRO’s development team, please read the Non-supported language considerations section.

The SYSPRO development team have tested and verified a number of additional languages that work with our product, even though a standard language dictionary has not been supplied.

These are referred to as ‘selected languages’ and include the following:

The majority of issues relating to foreign language support are user interface related, however the following are additional factors to consider:

It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of all conceivable user interface areas that should be verified before supporting a foreign language, however a basic list of suggested areas to research, consider and test would be as follows:

Before committing to develop a new foreign language dictionary, there are a number of cost elements to consider as part of the decision making process, each of which may be significant.

An important issue to consider when researching a new language for use in SYSPRO, is the ability to capture data in a foreign language that then reflects in subsequent queries and/or printed documents, exactly as it was captured (e.g. codes, descriptions and notes).

Part of supporting SYSPRO in a foreign language requires you to verify that all the characters in the language character set are displayed correctly in the various programs. This includes display and entry forms, listviews, grids, messages, notes, etc.

You should also ensure that the same characters are correctly printed when using the SYSPRO Reporting Services reports and other relevant documents (such as AR statements or Invoices).

It is important to note that SYSPRO software in no way attempts to translate the text that forms part of your data (i.e. if you enter a description or note, the text is not translated from one language to another, but rather is stored and shown exactly as it was entered).

The ability to enter textual data and have it stored correctly depends on a number of technologies. Therefore, if you require the ability to enter and store foreign text data that then renders correctly, you should consider the following tips regarding SQL Server based data storage:

SYSPRO companies use SQL Server for their data storage mechanism, therefore the vast majority of alphanumeric strings entered in SYSPRO will be stored in the database as a datatype ‘char’ or ‘varchar‘.

The collation defined against the database will determine the valid characters that can be entered and stored in each column.

In addition, SYSPRO reserves a maximum amount of storage for each alphanumeric column, so you should ascertain that this maximum storage is appropriate.

For example: The stock description column is 50 characters - varchar (50).

SYSPRO databases must have a case sensitive collation configured. There are two broad types of collations that are case sensitive:

For the best level of performance, a ‘_BIN2’ collation should be used (e.g. Latin1_General_BIN2), as this supports many western languages. However most case sensitive collations can be used.

You should therefore ascertain the recommended collation to be used for the language selected.

Various parts of the SYSPRO application use XML to send and retrieve information.

To ensure that characters in XML strings are handled as expected, you require an appropriate XML encoding to be applied. This can be described in the language dictionary text file (Lang_xx.TXT) as part of the file header.

The dictionaries supplied with SYSPRO require the following configurations related to their code page, character sets, XML encoding and fonts:

Selected languages (those that we do not provide a standard dictionary, but that have in fact been tested to work with our product) require the following configurations:

On Microsoft Windows your System Locale determines the default code page and character set used when displaying text in various parts of Windows and other applications such as SYSPRO.

Within your regional settings you can configure the System Locale with the location and language you require. This must be done for each workstation that requires entering and displaying the correct characters of that language.

The System Locale requires a reboot to change and you can only select a system locale if the appropriate language group is installed (i.e. you need the script support to select a system locale).

Microsoft SQL Server has a set of collations that provide support for various languages. These collations ensure that when characters are stored in ‘char‘ and ‘varchar‘ columns, the symbols are stored, retrieved and ordered in the appropriate language.

Therefore ensure that your SYSPRO company database has an appropriate collation configured within Microsoft SQL Management Studio.

For example: If you wish to use Greek as your language, select the 'Greek_BIN2' SQL Server collation, as this is a binary collation and supports both the Greek and English character sets.

When adding a database in Microsoft SQL Management Studio, define the appropriate language collation and ensure to use either the binary (BIN or BIN2), or case and ascent sensitive (CS.AS) collation options.

If possible, you should aim to use a binary collation as it can provide improved performance over a purely case sensitive collation. In addition, if there is a BIN2 version of the collation, then typically you should select that one as it often provides the most modern interpretation of the characters available for the selected collation/language. The ‘BIN’ collations are retained for backward compatibility and can be ignored.

If you are a SYSPRO Espresso user and wish to have your Espresso application reflect in one of the 5 supported languages, you would need to follow the standard implementation steps for SYSPRO.

Once you have completed the implementation configuration for the language you require, there is an additional step required for the translation to work in Espresso:

Within the Operators program, there is an option against the Language field of the e.net tab, where you can indicate the preferred language in which you want to display the user interface for business objects. This option is legacy related.

See Logon parameters for business objects for the current recommended method.

If you wish to configure logon parameters for accessing business objects in a foreign language, the following variables may be used:

Generic example:

Logon = (Oper, Pass, Comp, Pass, Lang, Debug, XMLIn)

Specific example - French:

Logon = (‘ADMIN’,‘’,‘EP01’,‘’,,‘’,‘<Logon><Lang>FR</Lang></Logon>’)

When using the XMLIn parameter, ensure to open and close each instruction in the same case.

SYSPRO determines the default language code to use in the order listed below. As soon as one item is found to be configured/true, then that language is used.

The dictionary files are located on the server in a client-server environment. However the client-side application requires direct access to the dictionary to interact with the operator appropriately. Therefore when you login to SYSPRO the dictionary files must be transferred to the client if they are out-of-sync (or have been updated on the server). This process is known as ‘Self-Healing’.

Note that if the dictionary has not been modified on the server since the last time it was self-healed then the system does not transfer the dictionary to the client, making the login process faster.

Whilst there can be a large number of dictionaries matching the patterns described above only the following dictionaries will be self-healed and therefore it is recommended that these exact names are used when creating or maintaining dictionaries:

A mnemonic is a term used to define or specify a computing function (i.e. an abbreviation for an operation).

How mnemonics are applied:

SYSPRO's language translation takes mnemonics into consideration for all languages that use the Latin alphabet. Therefore any applicable/available mnemonics will reflect once your system has been translated.