If you are interested in providing a language translation, there's four things you need to do.

1. Provide a locale specific messages.properties file

Located in WEB-INF/classes/localisation/, this file contains the text for the OpenVPMS web application.

2. Provide locale specific errmessages.properties files

Throughout the codebase, there are errmessages.properties files that contain the text for exception messages.

3. Change the archetype display names

The archetypes (the *.adl files in the update/archetypes/ directory of the distribution) are all in English. These need to be changed to have locale-specific displayNames for each of the nodes.

4. Provide locale-specific report templates

For the properties file, you just need to create a *_<locale>.properties file along side the original. e.g. messages_fr.properties for French. These will be picked up and used automatically based on the system locale.

The archetypes and report templates are more difficult, as it means you have to maintain parallel versions, one for each locale you want to support.

For the archetypes, there is a project set up to improve this here: http://www.openvpms.org/project/archetype-internationalisation. It needs more discussion and funding to go ahead.

-Tim