Translating Reports with Report Language Files

When you create a report, you select a report language, which contains all the framing text used in the generation of the report for the selected language, such as report section titles, types of model objects, and their properties. PowerDesigner ships with support for English (default), French, and simplified and traditional Chinese. You can edit these files, or use them as the basis for creating your own files for translations into other languages.

Report language files have an .xrl extension and are stored in install_dir/Resource Files/Report Languages. To view the list of report languages, select Tools > Resources > Report Languages. For information about the tools available in resource file lists, see PowerDesigner Resource Files.

In the following example, Entity Card, Entity Description, and Entity Annotation are shown in English and French as they will appear in the Report items pane:



The report language files use GTL templates (see Customizing Generation with GTL) to factorize the work of translation. Report Item Templates interact with your translations of the names of model objects and Linguistic Variables (that handle syntactic peculiarities such as plural forms and definite articles) to automatically generate all the textual elements in a report and dramatically reduce (by around 60%) the number of strings that must be translated in order to render reports in a new language.

For example the French report title Liste des données de l'entité MyEntity is automatically generated as follows: