SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services language setting

Question

Ok, i need to write a report in Arabic (ar-AS), the information for this report is in a database in English, with varchar columns (not nvarchar) with collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

The Language Settings for Reports and Report Designer only changes dates, currency, and numbers to the given language. I also need static text (column headers) on reports as well as the information being retrieved from the database to be formatted in the given language (Text right to left and characters mapped accordingly).

The text being converted is just names and addresses, nothing that would require Google translator.

Is it possible, I've come up empty so far.

My question is similar to this but i also want the English text to be formatted as Arabic.

Answer 1

The closest solution i found was using

SQL Analysis Services Translations feature makes all this a thing of the past, however. Assuming that your data is moving through a cube, you can use this great feature to localize all your text, including captions, data, etc

Also i don't think its possible to convert Arabic, Chinese, Japanese to English, since these languages have a different number of alphabets in their respective languages. Therefore there is no equivalent of the letter "A" in Japanese. No translation is possible for words that do not exist in a dictionary, such as names, and addresses.

The solution to this therefore is to store the data as nvarchar (SQL Server) in your database with the appropriate collation so that it can be extracted in the correct alphabet.

Good game world...

[edit] - fixed grammar, cos adolf said so

Answer 2

what you need to do is create a .NET assembly and reference that in your application. In the assembly you can use a resource file (.resx) and create a function to grab the correct strings. Then wrap your static text in your report in expressions calling your function from your assembly, getting the correct text based on what locale you pass in.