Change the language of dropdownlist items

Question

I have a web application, which I change the language of, but I can't change the language of the dropdownlist items. Can any one help me?

Answer 1

Static values

I assume your dropdown values are not received from a dynamic source like a database.

In that case, Visual Studio or .NET provides this feature with localized resource files. Each language has it's own resource file, e. g. Resources.us-US.resx and Resources.de-DE.resx. You will add these resource files to you project and the application choose the correct language based on the OS language.

This is the way how you would like to provide multilanguage in your .NET application.

MSDN Article

If you localize your project, you will want to create localized versions of the project resource file. For example, strings are the most common type of resource to be localized. The localized files are not displayed in the Resource Designer, but you can create and view them in Solution Explorer.

Have a look at this article and this walkthrough, they describe how to embedded the resource files into your project.

Additional information

The implementation with localized resource files also allows you to change the language manually and ignore the underlying OS language. For example this snippet (execute before your main ui thread) set the language always to German, whenever you start your application.

CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("de-DE");
Application.CurrentCulture = culture;
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture = culture;
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture = culture;

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(culture.Name);
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(culture.Name);

Dynamic values from database

If you receive your dropdown values from a database you will need extra tables and relationships. Have a look at this approach. My example is a very simple implementation, where you could reference from each value to a corresponding translation.

+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| DropdownValue |   DropdownEnglish   |    DropdownGerman   |
+---------------+---------------------+---------------------+
|  Id |  Basic  | Id |     English    | Id |     German     |
+-----+---------+----+----------------+----+----------------+
|  1  |  value1 |  1 | translation_e1 |  1 | translation_g1 |
+-----+---------+----+----------------+----+----------------+
|  2  |  value2 |  2 | translation_e2 |  2 | translation_g2 |
+-----+---------+----+----------------+----+----------------+
|  3  |  value3 |  3 | translation_e2 |  3 | translation_g3 |
+-----+---------+----+----------------+----+----------------+