If your portlets target an international audience, you can localize your portlets’ user interfaces. To localize a portlet, you need to create language properties files, also called resource bundles, for each language you wish to support. You can translate language properties manually or use a web service to translate them for you. Conveniently, all of the translated messages used by Liferay Portal are also accessible to plugin projects. To localize messages in addition to portal’s localized messages, you must create language keys in one or more resource bundles within your plugin project. When planning your portlet’s localization, you should consider the following questions.
Are there messages that Portal uses that you’d like to use in your portlets? Does your plugin contain multiple portlets? If so, do any of its portlets need to be available for administrative purposes in the Control Panel? If any of its portlets need to be in the Control Panel, you should create separate resource bundles for each of these portlets. Otherwise, your portlets should share the same resource bundle so that you can leverage Liferay’s language building capabilities from Liferay IDE and the Plugins SDK. You’ll learn how to localize your portlets in all of these scenarios.