Localization’s in Oracle

The Oracle Applications software functionality is written primarily for the US market. In this article, we will explore the concept of localization in Oracle Applications and how it is different from the national language support in Oracle.

Localization:

The Oracle Applications software functionality is written primarily for the US market.  Other countries may have specific requirements, usually statutory, such as types of reporting or ways of dealing with Sales Tax that may be incompatible with the way that the software is designed, and not easily solved by workarounds.   In such cases, Oracle Development produces software patches, known as “Localization’s” which are applied to the install of the software in order to provide the required functionality.  Oracle has been working through the development of these patches country by country.  This has been a major obstacle to the speed of global implementations, particularly in less developed regions with rapidly expanding economies such as Latin America.  Oracle has produced Localization for Austria, Denmark, India, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and others, with development work continuing on Eastern Europe and Latin America. 

WARNING:  A patch applied to an instance shared by several countries affects the software used by all countries.  Compatibility between patches needs to be carefully tested. 

National Language Support

This is distinct from Localization’s as it operates either your database or applications in a foreign language. Software can be applied which translates the forms and reports into a specific language. Key Oracle concepts are also controlled by National Language support.  User profiles for flexfields control whether entries are keyed left to right or as in Arabic or Hebrew, right to left.  More than one language can exist in the same instance, and can vary between users.  A Responsibility can be assigned a specific language.