LOCALELANGCHG System Option

Determines whether the language of the text of the ODS output can be changed
Valid in: configuration file, SAS invocation
Category: Environment control: Language control
PROC OPTIONS GROUP= LANGUAGECONTROL
Default: LOCALELANGCHG is set to off in all servers except for the UNICODE server
Tip: The Language Switching feature, which uses the LOCALELANGCHG option, is supported in a Unicode server (a SAS server with a session encoding of UTF-8, ENCODING=utf8).

Syntax

LOCALELANGCHG | NOLOCALELANGCHG

Syntax Description

LOCALELANGCHG
Specifies that the language of the SAS message text in ODS output can change when the LOCALE option is set after start up.
NOLOCALELANGCHG
Specifies that the language of the SAS message text in ODS output cannot change when the LOCALE option is set after start up.

Details

The Language Switching feature enables you to change the language of SAS messages after start up. You must enable LOCALELANGCHG to use this feature.
During start up, the configuration file and LOCALE option determine the language for SAS messages. After start up, if the LOCALE option and LOCALELANGCHG option are set, then the language for messages and ODS templates can change to reflect the LOCALE setting when the localizations are available.
You can enable LOCALELANGCHG but not translate into the language of the locale. For example, if you enable LOCALELANGCHG, then start a SAS session in French and set the locale to Greek, NLDATE displays in Greek. The output displays in French. The output displays in French because SAS does not translate into Greek.

Comparisons

If LOCALELANGCHG is enabled at start up and LOCALE is changed during the session, the ODS PATH is updated to include the translated template item store if it exists for the language of the new locale. Messages that do not appear in the SAS log appear in the language of the new locale. Also log messages appear in the original language of the session locale.
If LOCALELANGCHG is not enabled at start up and LOCALE is changed during the session, ODS output appears in the language that was set at start up.

Example

Example 1 is a French server with LOCALELANGCHG not enabled (NOLOCALELANGCHG).
If a French-client application connects to the server, the output appears in French, and dates, formatted by using the NLDATE format, appear in French. If a German-client application connects to the French server, and the locale is changed to German on the server, then output messages appear in French, and dates formatted with NLDATE appear in German.
Example 2 is a French server with LOCALELANGCHG enabled (LOCALELANGCHG).
If a French-client application connects to the server, the output appears in French, and dates, formatted by using the NLDATE format, appear in French. If a German-client application connects to the French server, and the locale is changed to German on the server, then output messages appear in German, and dates formatted with NLDATE appear in German.