Language Related Settings

Introduction

This article covers all language related menu options and configurations. 

As of version 2.8, a single ayfie Locator instance can now fully support more than one language. Before 2.8, all data would become searchable, but only data pertaining to one language would benefit from linguistic features such as grammatical normalization (stemming), spell checking, etc.

The graphic below shows the components affected by the language settings covered in this document. Black is data related and red is GUI related settings.

For more details on each of the components shown above, read ayfie Locator Architectural Overview.

The GUI Language

The default ayfie Locator GUI language dirctely upon installation is always English. The default language cannot be set during installation, only later. In the following we will show how to change the langauge of the various GUI components.
For an overview of Locator language support please see What languages does ayfie Locator support? 

Search Front End

The search front end is the part of ayfie Locator that is accessed by most users. This component supports 16 languages.

How an Admin Sets the Default Language

The screenshot below shows how an administrator may change the front end GUI language.:

How an User can Change the Language

The screenshot below shows how a user may change the front end GUI language.

Dashboard

The Language of the Dashboard is set in the browser. In this examle we show how this is done in Chrome:

And here we see the effect of the setting in the Dashboard:

Management Console

The language displayed in the GUI of the Management Console desktop application follows that of the OS as long as that the selected language is one of these 6 supported languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German or Portuguese.

In the example below we are setting the language to Portuguese and the region to Portugal with Start Button → Settings → Time & language → Region & language as shown here:

For the changes to take effect, make sure your new setting is moved to the top of the list and then log out and in of your Windows account.
If you then open the ayfie Locator Console Manager, everything will be in the selected language as shown here:

Search Query Language

Using the right or wrong query language will effect features such as grammatical normalization (stemming), spell checking, and other language dependent features.
Below we see how an admin can change the default query language and an end user the actual query language.

How an Admin Sets the Default Language

Using the dashboard at http://localhost/Dashboard/Configuration/DefaultUserSettings, an administrator can set the default query langauge as shown here:

How an User can Change the Language

The user may change the language of the query as shown in the graphic below. The list of languages to choose from maps to the list of indexing languages that was set during installation (ref. next section):

Indexing Languages

Setting Languages during Installation

Which langauges that are to be given full linguistic support during the indexing and subsequent searches, are set during installation. By default the installer will suggest English only. In the screenshot below we see how in this case Norwegian has been added to the default English:

Changing Languages Post Installation

It is possible to change the indexing languages at a later time by updating the value of the SolrLanguages key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\ayfie\Locator
Below we have set the languages manually in the Registry to the very same values as we did above using the installer. Notice the format, a space seperated list of hyphen connected language-dialect pairs:

For this change to take effect, one needs to restart xxxxxxx  and then reindex any repository containing text in the added language. In our example we have now removed Englsih and added Portuguese to  Norwegian and any repository containing Portuguese text will need to be reindexed for the change to have the desired effect).

OCR Conversion Languages

Setting Languages during Installation

Incoming data that are images or scanned documents are passed through OCR conversion to extract the text. The accuracy of the conversion is greatley improved by the converter knowing the actual languages of the text. For instance, if the converter knows that the text is Norwegian and not Portuguese, it will for instance never mistake a å for a ã.

By default the OCR languages are set to be the same as the index languages were set to be during installation (ref. earlier section above). 

Changing Languages Post Installation

It is possible to change the OCR languages after installation, and it also possible to have the OCR languages be a sub-set of the indexing languages. This would for instance make sense if one know for sure that all scanned documents are of one particular language whereas non-scanned data can be any one of let's say 5 languages.

To change the OCR languages, use the Via.Converter tool as shown here for the two languages Portuguese and Norwegian (notice that for this tool we do not use the two letter language codes, but the full names of the languages):

cd "C:\Program Files\ayfie\Locator\Tools"
Via.Converter.exe UPDATE /l:Portuguese;Norwegian

Keep in mind that these changes will have no effect until the affected documents have been refetched and reindexed.