In this post I will walk through how you can use MUI which is a new capability in SharePoint 2010 to provide user the ability to view profiles in different languages. This is particularly useful for global deployments where you have for ex. a user from Japan looking at another user’s profile who is in the US. The steps to configure alternate language described here are pretty much same if you were to do it for any site collection, only difference here is that the site collection is the my site host, since profile page URL is based on the URL of the my site host, MUI selector will provide the user ability to switch between multiple languages.
Assuming all the language packs are installed on the farm first thing you will need to do is browse to your my site host web application
in my lab this is http://my.contoso.local as you can see from the image below
Browse to the site settings page for this site collection using the site actions menu and click on “Language Settings” option under “Site Administration” section as shown in image below
In the alternate language settings select the languages you want to support, Languages displayed here in this page would totally depend on language packs installed. In my lab I have German and French language packs installed so I’ve added those two as shown in image below
At this point we are pretty much done with the configuration part. Now if we browse to a user profile you will see with MUI selector I can now switch to a alternate languages and all user interface elements of profile page is translated to the language user selected. Image below shows “Scott’s” profile page in German after switching language to German using MUI selector.
Obviously if you added custom properties you can go into “Edit Language” as shown in image below and provide translations for different languages
Image below shows the popup that comes up when you select edit languages which allows you to enter localized text for the profile property
Hope that walkthrough helped
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