For company operating in multiple countries and have Single Global Instance, may have to understand the features of globalization (formerly internationalization) support in Oracle E-Business Suite. Things which is covered under internationalization are:
- Unicode Support
- Multilingual Support (MLS)
- Regional Preferences (Locale) :Date format,number format,currency,name/Locale, support address order …etc.
- Calendars
- Currencies
- Timezones
- Address Management
- Single, Complete Data Model
Oracle EBS & National Language Support(NLS)
NLS setting gived ability to run in a language other than English and have ability to use date, number, and currency formats specific to certain country or region
Sometimes referred to as Locale , in EBS sometime you heard NLS patches…these are special patches that provide language translations including user interface labels, menus, and some Oracle seeded setup data.
Oracle EBS and Unicode Support
Unicode is a universal character set which includes all major scripts of the world in a simple and consistent manner
- Oracle database supports two Unicode character sets:
- AL32UTF8: based on latest Unicode standard, currently 5.0
- UTF8: on maintenance mode and supports Unicode 3.0 standard
Take a note, AL32UTF8 is the default Unicode database character set for Oracle EBusiness Suite installation in R12.1 when multiple languages are selected, where in 11i and R12 earlier had UTF8
Moreover ative character sets are still supported in EBS.
Oracle encourage to covert to AL32UTF8, as its support more characters and languages.
Fusion Apps will only support AL32UTF8 character set.
Those who is potentially looking for move to AL32UTF8 can explore Oracle Database Migration Assistant tool to provide an end-to-end
solution for migrating your databases from legacy encodings to Unicode
Oracle EBS and Multilingual Support (MLS)
That means Oracle E-Business Suite supports running multiple languages on the same instance simultaneously
Any number of supported languages (aka NLS patches) can be installed in a given instance
This Supports 34 languages covering 92 countries.
- American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian ,French, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish,German, Greek , Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Indonesian,Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian,Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
Indonesian,Lithuanian,Ukrainian, Vietnamese are new in R12.1
you can enable Languages via License Manager Page.
When MLS is enabled you can notice the number of rows in Base Table(xxxx_B) and Translation Table (xxxx_TL)
Base table row contains language-independent attributes
That means for each row in base table, N rows exist in translation table corresponding to the N installed languages
One row for each installed language contains translated textual attributes
Regional Preferences that we call as Locale
These are typically consist of
- Profile Settings :Some of the regional preferences (locale) is controlled via Profile . The setup can be done by administrators at various level like Site,Application,Responsibility & User. Setup for aech user can override default setting with preferred values
- User Preference Page

- Site Level Profile Options :ICX: Client IANA Encoding is used for IANA character encoding determines character set of HTML based
UI on client tier (Browser), this should be set to an IANA encoding equivalent to database character set. Recomebded is to set at site level
- User Level Profile Options : These are the some
- ICX: Language : This is defaulted to application language if no language is selected at login time. This profile determines language of email notifications, which can also be set to user’s preferred language
- ICX: Territory : This profile should be set to user’s territory (country), if this correctly setup , then it is used in conjunction with language code to pick the correct translation resources such BI Publisher templates .
- Client Timezone : R12 of Oracle E-Business Suite includes as standard a feature called User-Preferred Time Zone Support. In most existing E-Business Suite implementations, all users interact with the system in the “corporate time zone”, which will normally be the time zone of the headquarters of the implementing company, and the time zone in which the database runs. This means that remote users have to be aware of the time difference between their location and that of the corporate headquarters.This should be set to user’s Timezone.
Users see date-with-time fields in their preferred (local) time zone, and can enter dates with time in this time zone.
The data in the database continues to be stored in the standard corporate time zone
- FND: NATIVE CLIENT ENCODING : This is used to set the client (user) PC encoding, this also determines character encoding of file name and content. The will be used while exporting/importing spreadsheet data, uploading/downloading text files. Its Recommended to use the pre-set default value
- ICX: Date format mask : This can be set to user’s preferred date format
- ICX: Numeric characters : This is used to get any of these support combination.
- Comma / period (10,000.00)
- Period / comma (10.000,00)
- Space / comma (10 000,00)
- Space / period (10 000.00)
- Single quote / comma (10’000,00)
- Single quote / period (10’000.00)
International Calendar Support
R12.1.1 support Arabic Hijrah(The official calendar in Saudi Arabia with Arabic Hijrah month names ),English Hijrah(The official calendar in Saudi Arabia with English transliterated Hijrah month names). Users can choose their preferred calendar.
Hope this post helps to understand the latest internationalization suppport for Oracle EBS.