Changing Languages on a 5250 Screen

July 31, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hey, Joe:

I do technical support for a country in South America, where the AS/400’s primary language is 2931 (Spanish). But when I telnet over to do tech support, I want my screens to display in language code 2924 (English), which is installed on the machine as a secondary language. Is it possible to change my PC5250 screens to display English?

— Alex

It’s possible to change a user session’s PC5250 screen to display in any installed secondary language by adding a language library to the first position in the system part of the user’s library list. By default, your PC5250 session will display in the primary language of the system. To change the user’s display language, I’ve found that the following process works for me.

Check to see if the system you’re signing on to supports the language you want to use. To see a list of installed secondary languages for an OS/400 system, go to the Work with Licensed Programs menu by typing in GO LICPGM from a green screen. Choose option 20, Display Installed Secondary Languages. Installed languages are identified by a language identifier (a four digit number that usually starts with 29xx) and a description of the language that the identifier describes. English is designated with language ID 2924.

Once you know the language ID, you need to add its language library to the system part of your user library list. Be sure to add it to the system portion–not the user portion– of the list, or your screens will continue to display all literals in the default primary language. To create the name of your target language library, add the four-digit language identifier to the back of the QSYS literal. Doing this, you’ll find that QSYS2924 is the language library for English, QSYS2931 is the library for Spanish, and so on. So, if you want to change your default 2931 5250 session to display in 2924, you could add QSYS2924 to the system portion of your library list by entering the Change System Library List (CHGSYSLIBL) command, as follows:

CHGSYSLIBL LIB(QSYS2924) OPTION(*ADD)

And the next time you redisplay a screen, it will use the QSYS2924 library (which contains your English objects) to retrieve the language objects that PC5250 displays.

The QSYS2924 library will remain in your library list until you sign off. If you want to remove QSYS2924 from the system portion of your list for the current session, you can remove it from the list by changing the CHGSYSLIBL OPTION parameter to *REMOVE, as follows:

CHGSYSLIBL LIB(QSYS2924) OPTION(*REMOVE)

CHGSYSLIBL is a restricted command, so you either need to have access to the command, or you can wrap the command in a CL program and call the CL as a sign-on program when the user logs on. Before careful, though, if you’ve permanently added a language library to QSECOFR’s library list and you want to perform an OS/400 V5R1 upgrade. IBM‘s upgrade documentation states that you need to remove language libraries from QSECOFR’s library list before you perform an upgrade. So keep that in mind if you’re modifying the QSECOFR library list or it may cause problems during an upgrade.

Hope this helps.

— Joe

Sponsored By TRAMENCO

The Training and Mentoring Company (Tramenco) is dedicated to just one thing: Advancing your career by giving you the skills you need to solve real-world business problems. Choose from a menu of training options to fit your needs: onsite seminars, public seminars, mentoring, consulting, books, CBTs, and Web-based training. For more information about Tramenco’s career enhancing opportunities, call (800)421-8031 or go to www.tramenco.com.