A lot of different languages are available for the back end, but by default this language may not be installed. If you want a translated back end, get your language pack and install it using the back end installer. After this, go to the extensions menu, select language manager and make your language the default one. Your back end will be translated instantaneously.
Users who have access rights to the back end may choose the language they prefer in their personal details parameters.
This is of course also true for the front-end language.
A good place to find where to download your languages and localised versions of Joomla is on our Help Site.
Yes! Prior to Joomla! 1.5, only the text values of an article and only for ISO-8859-1 encoding was allowed in the PDF rendition. With the new PDF library in place, the complete article including images is rendered and applied to the PDF. The PDF generator also handles the UTF-8 texts and can handle any character sets from any language. The appropriate fonts must be installed but this is done automatically during a language pack installation.
Within the installer you will find a wide collection of languages. The installer currently supports the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Bengali, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Devanagari(India), Croatian(Croatia), Magyar (Hungary), Italian, Malay, Norwegian bokmal, Dutch, Portuguese(Brasil), Portugues(Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Svenska, Thai and more are being added.
By default the English language is installed for the back and front-ends. You can download the language files from the Joomla! extensions site. In addition some translation teams are offering fully localised versions of the entire package. Please check the Joomla! help site for links to locations where languages and localised versions can be found.
The collation option determines the way ordering in the database is done. In languages that use special characters, for instance the German umlaut, the database collation determines the sorting order. If you don't know which collation you need, select the "utf8_general_ci" as most languages use this. The other collations listed are exceptions in regards to the general collation. If your language is not listed in the list of collations it most likely means that "utf8_general_ci is suitable.
In Joomla! 1.5 all user interfaces can be localised. This includes the installation, the administrator interface and the front end site.
The core release of Joomla! 1.5 is shipped with mutliple language choices in the installation but languages for the site and administration interfaces need to be added after installation. (Other than English). Links to such language packs exist below.
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