Language support

Maximo® Manage is available in a number of languages. You can specify languages when you activate the application.

The following settings control the languages that are displayed in the user interface:
Browser language setting
If content is available for the language that users select for their browser, the application shows that language. If the language that is selected in the browser is not available, the application displays the base language.
Preferred language setting
In IBM® Maximo Application Suite, users can select a preferred locale, language, and time zone when they set up their profile. If you change the user's preferred language setting in Maximo Manage, future synchronizations do not overwrite the setting from Maximo Application Suite.
Application language settings
When Maximo Manage is deployed, you can select a base language, which is the default language for the application. By default, the base language is English. If you select a different language, the language is permanently set as the base language, and you cannot change it in subsequent deployments. If the base language is not specified when the application is deployed, the default value is used instead. If the default value is used, you can change the base language when you redeploy.

The base language can be changed only once. After it is changed, it cannot be changed back to English or any other language.

You can select other languages when you activate the application. You cannot remove languages after the application is activated.

If you use IBM Db2® and plan to install a language other than English, select the checkbox for Db2 Vargraphic when you configure your database.

Although Maximo Application Suite does not support bidirectional languages, Maximo Manage provides language support for bidirectional languages.

To add a language, on the Activation page, in the Base field and the Additional field, select the language code.

Note: If you want to use the database to deploy Maximo Manage only in English, you can choose Latin1_General_CI_AI collate for SQL Server. If you plan, for example to deploy Maximo Manage in Japanese, the choice is Japanese_CI_AI. For more information about which collate to use for each language, see SQL Server documentation. Although SQL Server supports Unicode, Maximo Manage does not support SQL Server, so you cannot set it. Therefore, you cannot deploy Maximo Manage with multiple languages in case those languages require different collates, for example: simplified Chinese and Russian.
The following languages are supported:
  • Arabic (AR)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR)
  • Croatian (HR)
  • Czech (CS)
  • Danish (DA)
  • Dutch (NL)
  • English (EN)
  • Finish (FI)
  • French (FR)
  • German (DE)
  • Hebrew (HE)
  • Hungarian (HU)
  • Italian (IT)
  • Japanese (JA)
  • Korean (KO)
  • Norwegian (NO)
  • Polish (PL)
  • Simplified Chinese (ZH_CN)
  • Slovak (SK)
  • Slovenian (SL)
  • Spanish (ES)
  • Swedish (SV)
  • Traditional Chinese (ZH_TW)
  • Turkish (TR)
Note: Maximo Manage supports Db2, Oracle Database, and Microsoft SQL Server. However, it cannot support Microsoft SQL Server when the database collation is set to Turkish.

Because Maximo Manage does not handle Turkish i characters that are stored in Db2 and Oracle Database, those characters are not supported.

Multi-language support in Maximo Manage

If your environment is configured to use multiple languages, user interface elements and certain data fields are shown in the language that is set by the user.

Field labels and menus appear in the user's language. However, the following key values in Maximo Manage remain in the base language and are not translated.

  • Work order numbers
  • Ticket number
  • Status codes from the synonym domain
  • Type of object, record, or transaction

If an English user enters data in a company description field in English, a German user sees the same description in English. To see the description in German, the user can update the field. By default, the Company.NAME field is configured to support and enable multi-language by using the mlsupported and mlinuse attributes. If a field is flagged as mlsupported, the field can store separate values for different languages. Users who have their environment in another language can view that content in that language, if the translation is provided. When a field is mlinuse, the field is enabled to store multiple language versions of the content.

Other tables can be enabled for multi-language in the Database Configuration application in Maximo Manage. The work order table is not supported by multi-language because this table if a transactional table.

The data in the fields that are supported and enabled for multi-language appear in the language in which the data is entered. A user who uses a different language can change this data by overwriting the data in the other language.

If data, such as a description, is entered by a base language user, then other language users see the data that was created by the base language user. However, if a nonbase language user, such as a Dutch user, enters the description, then the base language user or non-Dutch users do not see the description. The field is blank. Non-Dutch users can then enter the description in their own words. This implies that two or more copies of data are retained for mlsupported fields, one for the original language and one for each additional language.

When the German user retrieves a work order that is in English and changes the description or the work order from English to German, the German user always sees the description in German. The English user continues to see the description in English. The exception is the description in the work order table because as a transactional table, this table is not supported by multiple languages. Updates to other tables that are supported by multiple languages are applied.

The only way that data in one field appears in multiple languages is when the user modifies the content in the field to their own language. Maximo Manage does not automatically translate information.