Rashed Amini

Recently I was asked to help with localization of Dynamics NAV for Korea. I was involved a couple of years ago with another project that we implemented in Korea and so I knew the process on how to localize NAV classic client. The project was on version 4.0 sp3. Microsoft has not localized NAV for any country in Asia, except India. On partner source you can find the download for all localized countries / regions. Instead local partners in those countries localize it themselves. The process involves creating caption for all the fields, errors, messages, and reports. To localize the executable, you have to translate fin.stx. In addition Korea uses double-byte character sets (DBCS), which you need to enable in fin.stx. The following link provides steps on how to enable DBCS on you computer

Once you are done with translation, you need to send fin.stx to Microsoft to “close” the file. It basically creates a checksum in the file.
This is how classic client looks in Korean.

With Role Tailored client for NAV 2009 R2 fin.stx is no longer used. Instead you need to download a template project provided by Microsoft. Here is the link

Once you open the project, you will need rename resources.en-CA.resx to your language codes. On MSDN you will find a list of all the country codes. The Download link above contains a word document with links inside them. Once you have renamed all the files, you will need to go through each project and sign the assembly. These steps are explained in details in the download above. This is a screenshot of solution in Visual Studio.

You will need to translate all the resx files and compile/build the project. Visual Studio will create in debug folder all the necessary DLL files. If you see a folder en-CA in the output folder when compiling the project/solution, it means you have missed renaming all the resx files. Since I don’t know Korean I left all the translation as is. A native speaking person will do a much better job translating this.
Once the DLL were created, you will need to create a folder (ko-KR) under the RTC for the language and put the dll files as well as all the help files. Under the service tier you will need two folders. (KOR and ko-KR) KOR olds all the help files and ko-KR contains the dll files.

The Role Tailored client only runs dll files that are signed and in order to use them you will to run the Client Add-in and specify all the dll files and their public Key Token. This is how it should look like.

Once you have done all the steps, restart the service tier. Start the RTC and you should see your language in the select Language option. If you don’t see it, it means you’ve made a mistake somewhere in your process. Here is a screenshot of RTC in Korean.

You’ll notice that a lot of stuff is still in English and the reason is that I have not translated the resx files. But existing translation for the existing caption translated is still present. Thus it will require much less effort to finish the translation.
The new method to translate the RTC makes it very easy for partners to localize the RTC for countries that MS is not releasing NAV. It no longer requires MS involvement with fin.stx. Hopefully in future RTC will be Unicode compliant and you wouldn’t need to do anything special with DBCS or unchecking Validate Collation setting.